100: Human Plus AI Strategy: Redefining Team Structure in the Age of Automation with Evan J Schwartz

**Evan J Schwartz** (0:00)
If your goal is to add AI so you can cut headcount for cost, you've already lost and you don't even know it.

**Chris Daigle** (0:06)
What industries do you see we're really going to notice a bigger impact?

**Evan J Schwartz** (0:10)
The service-oriented industries are going to get hit first. Anywhere there's a service involving a computer, you're going to start seeing the embedding of AI across those services. Anywhere where you've got a set of hands wrenching in and making something happen, that's going to take longer.

**Chris Daigle** (0:23)
Let's talk about that business structure. I'm particularly interested in what that structure of the future looks like.

**Evan J Schwartz** (0:28)
Almost all corporate structures are going to squeeze down to about three levels. I'm just going to have stewards managing orchestrators that are managing hundreds of sub-agents that are doing the execution plan. The iteration is going to be faster and more efficient and more efficient. This is why I'm urging companies to not sit it out and wait. Because your competitor who gets this model and gets it working, their ability to iterate will be so fast.

**Chris Daigle** (0:54)
Evan Schwartz is a technology and innovation leader who helps organizations use AI to grow faster, operate smarter, and build a future where people and intelligent systems work together. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Daigle. Each week, we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs, and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started. Right now, every business leader is asking the same question. What are we going to do about AI? If this is you, chiefaiofficer.com has the answer. We'll give you a simple path forward where we provide executive and team training so your people know exactly how to safely use Generative AI in their day-to-day. We also manage the deployment and implementation to make sure tools actually get adopted and deliver results. We'll also guide company-wide transformation so AI becomes part of your operating system, not just another shiny object. The companies that act now will increase productivity, cut costs, and grow faster than their competitors. Those that wait will get left behind. So if you want to make AI work in your business, visit chiefaiofficer.com and see how we're helping companies of all sizes finally get results from AI. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Using AI at Work. I'm Chris Daigle. I'm the host, and I am coming to you from Austin, Texas, where our organization just sponsored and spoke at a Vistage event for local CEOs here in Austin, and we talked to them all about AI. It's pretty fascinating to see the different pockets of America and where the adoption is happening. As you would imagine, Austin was a pretty tech forward place.
With that being said, that's why I'm not in our normal studio. I'm coming at you from an Airbnb, but our guest today is Evan Schwartz. And Evan and I had a chance that we've been trying to do this episode for a month or so, and we had a chance to talk, but he was on his way out of the country heading to Ireland, Galway, Ireland, to facilitate, yeah, to facilitate.
And well, I'm going to let Evan talk about it a little bit, but today's conversation is going to cover really a lot of topics that are interesting to me, the impact of AI on education, what are younger users doing and how are they behaving with these? Because if you're listening to this and you got kids, and they haven't really picked up the AI bug yet, there might be some lessons learned from today that will help you communicate with your younger ones, the importance of starting to leverage AI in their business.
And we're just going to talk about AI and AI expertise. So Evan, before we get started, I want to ask you a question that, and again, I'm borrowing this from Greg Eisenberg with his podcast, but he always asks, what do you want people to walk away from today's episode with?

**Evan J Schwartz** (3:41)
If we can inspire people to realize that we're not victims, we get to choose the future. Life happens because of us, but not to us. I would love that. I preach a person plus AI strategy. And I hear on more than just these two talking heads here today, of how doom and gloom and how everyone's going to lose their job and all that stuff. We get to make that decision together.
Right? So person plus AI strategy isn't happening to us.
And if you're not participating in the outcome, you might be part of the problem. So I'm hoping we can talk about it and I can arm your viewers with what they can do to help drive the outcome of a better world rather than the apocalyptic world that I think is getting a lot of clickbait.