The Tech Is Ahead Of The Org Chart

Keep noticing more of these job postings. Forward Deployed Engineers — FDEs — embedded inside customer organizations, hands on the actual work. Chief AI Officers, Heads of AI, VPs of AI. Roles that didn't exist two years ago, now sitting at the executive level.

At the same time, Block cut 40% of its workforce in February and Coinbase just cut 14%, both citing AI. Coinbase is flattening to five layers below the CEO and testing "one-person teams" — engineer, designer, and PM combined into a single role, augmented by AI. Dorsey's talking about taking Block from five management layers down to two or three.

So one side of the org chart is adding roles that didn't exist before. The other side is deleting entire layers of roles that did. Both are the same admission — the old shape doesn't fit anymore. Hierarchy was always the answer to a coordination problem, getting a lot of people moving in roughly the same direction on something complicated, and a chunk of that coordination is quietly getting absorbed by the software now. The layers that used to translate strategy down and information up start feeling like overhead instead of structure.

Underneath all of it is the real realization: putting AI to work inside an actual company is its own skill, separate from building the model and separate from just using it.

The tech is ahead of the org chart, and companies are inventing roles in real time to close that gap while flattening everything else around it to move faster. What's left after the flattening is stranger than what came before it — smaller, more autonomous units doing more of the actual work, a thin layer at the top mostly orchestrating, and this new role somewhere in the middle whose whole job is figuring out how the company should run given what's possible this month versus what was possible last month.

Keep wondering where I fit in all of this. Best I can tell, I'm sitting right in the middle — between the people building this stuff and the people trying to actually use it. I can wear both hats. I've done both sides of the work.