My org chart has a new column, and honestly, some of the team members don’t have a heartbeat.
I’ve been staring at our org chart a lot lately. Not because something’s broken, but because I’m starting to see it differently. As many of you know, we’re fully in it when it comes to AI at ITBD. Every employee in our company is learning to be AI-enabled, whether that’s building better prompts, troubleshooting with AI support, or finding ways to work faster and smarter inside their role. This isn’t a side project for us. It’s the direction we’re moving as an organization, and I want us to lead it, not react to it.
What’s been occupying my thinking more recently is the idea of building out an actual AI workforce. Not just using AI as a tool, but treating certain digital roles as real seats on the team. Because here’s what I’ve realized: not every function needs a person behind it. Some roles need consistency, speed, and availability at a scale that a human can’t sustain. And for those, we now have options we didn’t have two years ago.
Rita and I recently built out a digital marketing team. We put together a content writer, a campaign manager, and a brand guardian, all AI-driven, all working within defined parameters that we set. Together, we built a full product launch campaign: the landing page, the email sequences, the LinkedIn posts, the execution workflow, and the metrics to measure how it performed. What would have taken weeks and a team of people came together with a fraction of the resources. That’s not a small thing.
The org chart of the future will have both real and digital employees sitting side by side, and figuring out which roles belong in which column is going to be one of the most important decisions leaders make over the next few years. For organizations that have always wanted certain capabilities but couldn’t justify the headcount cost, this is a real opening. The constraint used to be budget. That equation is shifting.
I’ll also say this honestly: I think this changes what we ask of the people on our teams. As digital workers take on more of the repeatable, process-driven work, the humans in the room are going to need to show up differently. More visibly. More actively. The hybrid model that let a lot of people coast quietly in the background is going to get harder to hide in, because the value a person brings will need to be clearly human: judgment, relationships, creativity, leadership presence. Those things still can’t be replicated, but they have to be demonstrated.
How to Start Building Your AI Workforce
At IT By Design, we help MSPs design and build AI-enabled functions that align with their org structure and growth roadmap.
If you’re a leader and you haven’t started mapping out where AI could fill a gap in your org, here’s where I’d actually begin.
Start with your pain points, not your wish list. Look at your current org chart and ask: where are we consistently under-resourced, slow, or inconsistent? Those are your first candidates for a digital role. For us, it was content volume and campaign execution. For you, it might be reporting, client communications, or onboarding documentation. The answer is in whatever keeps getting pushed to the bottom of the to-do list.
From there, define the role before you build it. Just like hiring a person, your digital employee needs a clear scope. What does this role own? What decisions does it make independently, and where does a human need to review the output? Rita spent real time on this before we launched our marketing team, and it made everything work better because the boundaries were set upfront.
Then start small and run it like a pilot. Pick one function, build it out, and measure the output over 30 days. Don’t try to redesign your entire org in one sitting. You’ll overwhelm yourself and your team. Prove the concept in one area, learn from it, and then expand from there. If you need help, let me know, we have a team that can help you understand your vision and roadmap, and then build out the functions to fill it. (shameless plug, but I really want to help 😊)
The New Standard for Leadership
The workforce is changing faster than most org charts reflect. The leaders who get ahead of it won’t just be the ones who adopt the tools. They’ll be the ones who had the courage to reimagine the team entirely, built it with intention, and never stopped refining it. That’s the standard worth building toward.
