AI is stripping out the commercial friction that previously required middle management as coordinators.
The old vertical model, with layers of functions passing work up and down the organisational pyramid, is being replaced by horizontal flows of cross-functional orchestration.
Traditional organisations run on vertical alignment. Each function optimises its own sequence of tasks, reporting neatly up the line. It looks tidy on a chart but in reality can be chaotic. Customers don’t live in your vertical world. They move sideways, across sales, production, logistics, and service, expecting a seamless experience.
AI is flipping that organisational pyramid on its side. It can connect once-isolated functions into a single horizontal process. What was once delegated up and down now needs to be orchestrated across.
Sequential processes, the bread and butter of functional work, are predictable. They’re easy to automate and improve. But the processes that serve customers aren’t sequential. They are coordinated, and they demand awareness of what’s happening across functions, not just within them.
This difference matters. Sequential work relies on delegation. Coordinated work requires orchestration. The first is mechanical; the second is more like music.
To orchestrate effectively, AI needs agency. It must be allowed to make choices within parameters, not just follow a script. Without that, automation collapses into the same bottlenecks middle management used to create while claiming to fix them. True orchestration demands that machines can choose the next note when the music changes.
This is gold for the cost hawks and process zealots who love squeezing inefficiency from sequential work. It is also gold for the customer-facing teams, because orchestration delivers something far more valuable: speed. When everything else is roughly equal, price, specification, guarantees, two things decide who wins.
- Delivered In Full, On Time, what was promised when it was promised, without error.
- Cycle time, how fast an order moves from request to fulfilment.
Do both better than the competition and you are operating inside their OODA loop, seeing, deciding, and acting faster than they can react.
AI will not just make work faster. It will force organisations to decide whether they develop and trust their AI systems more than existing their manual processes. That is not a technical question, it’s cultural: and it is coming faster than most hierarchies can flatten.
