From Org Charts to Work Charts

⏱️ Your Morning Brief (TL;DR)

Welcome back!

In the near future, a company’s workforce will be a blend of humans leading AI agents.

Microsoft named these companies ‘Frontier Firms’ in their Work Trend Index Annual Report. 

According to the report, every company will become a Frontier Firm within 2-5 years.

To make this happen, businesses will undergo structural and operational changes to integrate AI agents.

This week, we dig into what this looks like.

Here’s what to expect in this weeks newsletter:

• What is a Frontier Firm?

• The structural and operational Impacts to look out for

• 5 key takeaways as your company evolves

• A three phased approach to becoming a ‘frontier firm’

• 4 AI Agent use cases by other frontier firms

• 8 interesting reads

Let’s dive in.

 💡 This Week’s Deep Dive

Microsoft analyzed data from 31K workers across 31 countries and found the emergence of a new kind of organization they're calling the “Frontier Firm”.

What is a Frontier Firm?

Frontier Firms blend machine intelligence with humans, creating systems that are AI-operated but human-led. Microsoft believes every employee in a Frontier Firm is expected to become an agent boss, meaning they build, delegate to, and manage agents to amplify their impact.

What’s driving the change?

Employees are maxed out and leaders are looking for more. The report reveals that employees are interrupted every two minutes by meetings, emails, or pings.

About 82% of leaders plan to use AI agents in the next 12-18 months, “digital labour” is becoming as essential as electricity. With intelligence becoming a utility companies can buy, leaders can fill the gap in capacity.

Structural Impacts of Frontier Firms

The org chart, built on functional expertise, may be replaced by a work chart. Work charts are outcome-driven, where teams are formed around specific goals rather than siloed functions.

Employees will become “agent bosses.” The most valuable skill will be managing AI agents, not just using them.

A metric for Frontier Firms will be the human-agent ratio, the optimal balance between human oversight and agent efficiency.

Operational Impacts of Frontier Firms

AI agents will be purchasable on demand to scale workforce capacity and close the capacity gap.

The current capacity gap is wide, with over half of leaders saying productivity needs to increase, while the workforce lacks time and energy.

Expect a ton of task and workflow automation. Nearly half of leaders (46%) report their companies are using agents to automate processes for entire teams or functions.

GPTLDR Takeaways

The evolution of your company in becoming a Frontier Firm involves balancing the relationship between humans and their intelligence tools.

• From IC to Agent Manager: The biggest shift will require independent contributors to focus on creating and managing agents.

• The New “Hybrid Team”: A mix of human employees and agents.

• New Skills and Mindset: AI literacy, specifically learning to iterate with AI, deciding when to delegate, prompting with context and intent, refining outputs, and identifying weak responses and adjusting.

• Outcome Focused: The shift from organizational charts to a work focused chart delivering on outcomes.

• Elevating Human Responsibilities: Automation of major processes and workflows will expand responsibilities into high value, more complex tasks.

• Human to Agent Ratio: A new metric developed to optimize the balance between human oversight and agent efficiency with the aim of maximizing the impact of these teams

  • Too few agents per person results in underutilized resources and unrealized efficiencies.

  • Too many agents per person can overwhelm human judgment, leading to business risk and potential employee burnout.

📚 Interesting Reads

• The report itself. Microsofts 2025 Annual Work Trend Index (Link)

• Top 10 enterprise generative AI applications (Link)

• Avoiding skill atrophy in the age of AI (Link)

• AI can handle tasks twice as complex every few months (Link)

• Anthropic warns fully AI employees are a year away (Link)

• CIO: The next stage in the evolution of enterprise AI (Link)

• CIO: What makes a true AI agent? (Link)

 📈 Building Your Frontier Firm

Take a phased approach, witch each phase increasing levels of agent autonomy and integration. Over time, this will enable higher value and more complex work for humans.

• Phase 1 - Human with assistant: AI assistants in the hands of every employee to work better and faster.

• Phase 2 - Human-Agent teams: Integrate Agents into teams as "digital colleagues," taking on specific tasks under human direction.

• Phase 3 - Human-led, Agent-operated: The biggest shift is when employees become agent managers, setting direction, and agents to execute entire processes and workflows, with humans checking in as needed.

🏢 Examples of Agents at Frontier Firms

GPTLDR’s take - These are early examples demonstrate how AI agents are being used to improve service response times, reduce costs, and improve access to information.

🗳️ This Week’s Poll

 ➜ Until Next Week

Microsoft’s latest Work Trend Index reminds us that the next productivity leap will come from the collaboration between humans and the agents. Wherever your organization sits on the frontier map, take it one phase at a time.

Stay curious,
The GPTLDR Team

P.S. - We just launched Monday Briefs, curated reads on AI’s impact to your people, operations, technology and strategy. Check out the first release.