Org Redesign Free AI Framework - The AI Circles Reorg Exercise
In my recent conference talk, 'Beyond The AI Hype & AI’s Influence on Marketing,' I wanted to share my free circle exercise.
AI is going to be reshaping how many Department leaders are hiring and reducing headcount, but what many have not considered is how AI is going to continue to influence how Marketing, Growth & Product work is going to evolve and which Teams within the Departments are impacted and then reshaped.
To future-proof your business and your Department, as a leader you will need to think 12-18 months ahead and start to shape how your org will work in the less is more era while AI agents improve.
This is the exercise I have run through with Marketing & Product leaders in coaching, it has been hard work for leaders to allow themselves to step up and be able to reshift from day-to-day ops to a mindset of planning a strategic reorg - which many have never been through or been taught.
The Circle Reorg Exercise
The inner ring is what will be powered by AI, including the tools and workflows, as well as how hybrid AI (people + AI) will work hand in hand to optimise and improve your customers' experience and operational efficiencies. Below is from the conference deck and I mapped out the most common Marketing Teams within the circle and then called out which roles will then be impacted by agents and agentic AI.
Exercise 1: I recommend you book out an hour of your time and add your teams to the circles.
Agentic Disruption
You will notice from the AI circles re-org exercises that some roles will be impacted by agents and others will be less impacted, whether that’s from a tech perspective or the roles may not have a big enough influence on budgets to be worth building dedicated agents and new AI tools.
Enter The Generalist: Another one of my predictions is the smartest Marketers and the best Growth professionals will want to develop and broaden their skill sets and choose for themselves to move from “specialist” to generalist.
This won’t be limited to Growth and Marketing, specialist Product Managers will want to broaden out their skills and develop ways to influence the organisation further. The AI PM will likely be a fad, and every PM will have to operate as an AI PM.
Exercise 2: Following on from adding teams onto the right circles, you then add where agents and agentic will disrupt the teams and either work together and where you will have pressures to replace headcount from the leadership team or investors.
Agent Set Tasks For Humans
Something to ponder moving forward is how willing are your team members from taking tasks set by AI and have to report these tasks are complete - although tools already do this for some roles, this is a whole new way of thinking, and, as AI will be blamed for replacing headcount (which it may) but, also so the company can reinvest in tech like cloud infrustructure and security.
We are seeing this behaviour by the largest tech companies, already blaming “overhiring” and “underperformance”; however, they will not suggest this is down to having to reinvest and, in some cases overinvest in AI tech.
Good luck with your reorg planning and 2026 action plans - by running through my two exercises you will be ahead of the curve and set up to amend plans vs forced 9 box exercises and poorly timed rushing layoffs
