I keep noticing more of these job postings. Forward Deployed Engineers — FDEs — embedded inside customer organizations, hands on the actual work. And Chief AI Officers, Heads of AI, VPs of AI. Roles that didn't exist two years ago, now showing up at the executive level.
At the same time, Block cut 40% of its workforce in February and Coinbase just cut 14% citing AI acceleration. Coinbase is flattening to five layers below the CEO and experimenting with "one-person teams" where engineers, designers, and PMs are combined into a single role augmented by AI. Dorsey is talking about taking Block from five management layers down to two or three.
So one side of the org chart is adding entirely new roles. The other side is collapsing entire layers of existing ones. Both moves are the same admission — the old shape doesn't fit anymore. The hierarchy was always an answer to a coordination problem, how to get a lot of people to move in roughly the same direction on a complicated thing, and a lot of that coordination is quietly being absorbed by the software now. The layers that existed to translate strategy down and information up start to feel like overhead instead of structure.
What's underneath all of this is the realization that putting AI to work inside a real company is its own skill — different from building the model, different from just using it.
Capability has outrun adoption. The tech is ahead of the org chart, and companies are inventing roles in real time to close the gap while flattening everything else to move faster around it. What's left after the flattening is something stranger than what came before — smaller, more autonomous units doing more of the actual work, a thinner layer at the top mostly orchestrating, and this new role somewhere in there whose job is essentially to keep figuring out how the company should be operating given what's possible this month versus what was possible last month.
I keep wondering where I fit in all of this.