Decide what your organization should be before your agents do

On October 20, at its symposium in Orlando, Gartner presented its technology trends for 2027. Its analyst Gene Alvarez said organizations must move from being "a passive observer of model capabilities" to "an active architect of organization, human and machine boundaries." The trends were about technology. That sentence is about how a company is organized.

How a passive observer changes

A passive observer adopts AI as it arrives. A new model or tool comes out, a team finds a use for it, and the work around that use changes. Over a year, many small adoptions change the shape of the organization. Nobody chose the new shape. It is what the releases left behind.

The organization weighs more than the individual

Microsoft's 2026 Work Trend Index surveyed 20,000 people who use AI at work, in ten countries including Australia, the UK, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. Organizational factors, such as culture, manager support and talent practices, accounted for more than twice the AI impact people reported as their own mindset and behavior: 67% against 32%.

Culture, management and how people are developed are all choices leaders make. They are where an architect works.

If you have not decided what your organization should be, the next AI release will start deciding for you.

What an architect decides

McKinsey puts the logic in one line: "Start with the outcome, then assemble the humans and agents needed to deliver it." That turns three things most companies leave alone into design decisions.

The team. In one organization McKinsey describes, product teams of eight to ten people became teams of four to six, supported by agents. A smaller team is a different team. Someone has to decide who is in it and what each person owns.

The manager. McKinsey expects that, as AI absorbs coordination work, some of the work that justified management layers will shrink. It sees managers spending less time coordinating activity and more time creating opportunities for their people to practice. Leaders now have to decide what a manager's job is.

Expertise. As agents take on the entry-level work through which people have historically built expertise, McKinsey's warning is that "today's productivity gain can become tomorrow's judgment gap." A company that gives the first rung of a career to agents needs another way for people to learn.

These decisions used to come up once every few years, in a reorganization. They now come up every time agents take on new work. A leadership team that has agreed what it is building toward can make them one workflow at a time, as the work changes, instead of finding out later what the releases left behind.

Three questions for your leadership team

1. What should this organization be in three years, and what part will agents play in it?
2. Which changes from the past year did we choose, and which simply arrived with the tools?
3. Who on this leadership team owns that design?

At Wyrework, we work with leadership teams on both halves: agreeing the organization they are building toward, then rewiring it one workflow at a time with the people who do the work.