For years, the dominant conversation about workplace technology has centred on a single question: Which tasks will machines take over? Although this is an important question, perhaps a more useful one may be: How does technology reshape the way we organise work, not just the way we do it?  

This notion sits at the heart of OrgTech – technologies that change how organisations divide work, coordinate teams, allocate decision-making, monitor performance and resolve exceptions. It was also the topic of a recent webinar hosted by Phanish Puranam, The Roland Berger Chaired Professor of Strategy and Organisation Design at INSEAD. He was joined by collaborators Piyush Gulati from University College London and Arianna Marchetti from Singapore Management University, who both graduated from INSEAD’s PhD programme.

Their wide-ranging discussion touched on the differences between technologies that boost managerial-based coordination vs. peer-to-peer coordination; how strong culture can lead to as good a level of coordination as vertical authority; and how collaborative work management technologies can reduce managerial intensity and increase decentralisation in organisations. 

Inevitably, the conversation gravitated towards the impact of AI on managers. Puranam stated that while the future of managers may be in flux, AI could introduce new opportunities. “It may well be the case that managers, going forward, play the role of [teachers]… who are also training and inculcating the skills of their subordinates, not merely monitoring and coaching them,” he said, while admitting that this remains conjecture at this stage. “Another [opportunity] might be a new class of meta-organisational skills where what you’re doing is managing the coordination between humans and [AI] agents, and constantly redefining that division of labour. These are new tasks [that] would actually reinstate the demand for managers.”

Puranam stressed that as organisations harness technology in a bid to improve efficiency and innovation, they should remember that far from just being goal-oriented machines, organisations are also contexts in which people find meaning. 

“A lot of the work that my collaborators and I do today is to think about how we can deploy AI in organisations in a way that improves their goal-centricity – improves profits, makes them efficient, makes them innovative – without sacrificing human-centricity,” he said. “We shouldn’t forget that the technology is rapidly becoming a commodity… So, what would you differentiate on? It would be through human capital, and that’s the reason why the question of ‘why are we organising’ has to include some account of keeping these organisations human-centred.”