For as long as there have been managers, following and control came bundled. Explore what happens when AI pulls them apart — and why the leadership that survives is the kind no agent can absorb.

A few weeks ago I was on a panel at the HV Capital Talent Summit. The theme was “the agentic organization” — what companies look like when agent-to-agent communication handles most coordination and the org chart flattens under the weight of what AI can now do.

Somewhere in the second half of the conversation, I shared an observation from my practice:

“Many of my CEO clients are quietly reverting to a glorified, AI-powered founder mode — sort of a new-found love for being an individual contributor.”

A founder spots a problem Friday afternoon. They spend the weekend with an AI assistant — researching, refining, deciding. By Monday they walk into the leadership team meeting with a fully formed conclusion, and often with the implementation already in motion. No question posed to the team, no feedback loop, no buy-in — just the decision.

If you’ve done this recently, you know the feeling. It’s exhilarating! Finally, things are happening again! It’s the version of yourself that felt most alive ten years ago, when the company was you and a laptop and a very good idea.

I think what’s actually happening is that the promise of the agentic organization is arriving as permission — permission to step back into the part of the job that felt most powerful, the sole author with the fast decision, and skip the part that felt slowest and most exposed… people.

Which is why I want to make the case that this shift is going to be slower, and messier, than the hype pieces from AI-native founders suggest.

Here's what I believe the agentic-org writers get right: the managerial layer really is going to thin out over the coming years, much of it replaced by AI.

But they're quietly collapsing two different things.

In other words: management is span of control. Leadership is span of care. (Yes, I wrote about that here.)

But here's what the AI-pilled org thinkers conveniently forget: status matters to us. It always has. We're a social animal, and social systems organize themselves into rank and hierarchy. Most of the people leading today… well, they quite enjoy being top dog.

Donald Trump doesn't want to be an individual contributor — even if it might be more efficient. And neither do the people currently running most companies. Because status matters.

That's why this transition will take longer than the AI-native founders think. The people in leadership today aren't going back to being individual contributors, however senior. They don’t want to give up their power. Being a senior IC doesn't feed what the role was actually feeding.

The agentic organization is coming. I am sure of that. Some of it will happen faster than we’re ready for. But the people running these organizations aren’t going to hand over their following to an agent, and they shouldn’t.

Here's what that actually means. For as long as there have been managers, following and control came bundled. People followed you partly because you assigned the work, held the budget, knew what everyone was doing, cleared the path. The coordination was a big part of why you had a following at all.

Agents unbundle those two. The control goes to the machines. And what's left standing is the question that was always underneath it: strip away everything you used to coordinate — would these people still choose to follow you?

That's the real test of the next few years. Not whether you can move fast on your own over a weekend — even if it feels good.

The real test is whether the following you built can survive the removal of the thing that used to hold it together.

So here's the question to sit with this week, less to answer than to journal your way around:

when the coordination is gone, and all that remains is whether people still choose to follow you — who are you to them, then?

Yup, we’re going all out existential this week. Have fun!

Yours,