Last week, 11,000 people were told they no longer had jobs.
Meta cut 8,000, framed explicitly as the cost of becoming an AI-first organisation. Intuit cut 3,000 on the same morning, with their CEO making a point of saying this had nothing to do with AI. The reason given was reducing complexity, streamlining execution, cutting coordination-heavy roles.
Two different narratives, but the same underlying assumption.
Whether the justification is AI transformation or operational efficiency, both restructurings assume the organisation already knows which coordination is essential and which is overhead. They assume that the context carried by those roles has somewhere else to go. That what they are removing is friction, not necessary function.
In a recent essay, Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha made the AI case for this directly. Middle management exists to route information through organisations too large for any one person to oversee. AI can now do that continuously and at scale. They propose that AI needs a “world model,” a continuously updated picture of the whole organisation built from every decision, workflow, and artifact the business produces, and with it everything except the edges can be managed by AI. At Block, they argue, the remote-first culture means everything results in an artifact. The world model is therefore buildable and everything is available to AI.
It is a serious argument. And if the world model genuinely works, it does address the obvious concern about context loss.
Block’s artifact-rich environment is not typical. It may not even be 100% true for Block. Almost no organisation can point to a fully documented historical record needed to build a starting world model from scratch. Most do not actually know what they look like: the real decision paths, the informal coordination, the context that lives in people’s heads rather than in any system.
A world model is a compelling ambition. It is not a simple thing to build. And you cannot restructure around one you do not yet have.
The coordination cost does not live in people and roles. It lives in the model. Most organisations have not designed their model clearly enough to know what they are actually removing when they cut people who coordinate.
If this is the type of conversation happening in your organisation right now, I have office hours running most Fridays over the next several weeks. No agenda needed. Book a free slot: https://lnkd.in/e5QHTfHt