I have this theory I've been kicking around for two years, and every week AI gets better, the theory gets louder.
Departments are a relic.
Not all of them. Not tomorrow. But the reason companies have marketing departments and sales departments and engineering departments and support departments and legal departments and finance departments is because humans have a ceiling on cognitive load. One person can only hold so much in their head. One person can only execute so many tasks in a day. So we split work into departments, hired specialists, built org charts, and convinced ourselves this was the only way to run a company.
It's not. It was just the only way given the tools we had.
Here's what a traditional marketing function looks like: a marketing manager, a content manager, an SEO person, a digital advertising specialist, a social media manager, a designer, a copywriter, an editor. That's eight people. Just for marketing. At one company.
What if you had eight agents instead? And one person who understands marketing well enough to orchestrate them?
Not a marketing expert in every subdiscipline. A generalist with strong context who knows how marketing works, understands the business, and can direct AI agents that handle the execution. One human. Eight agents. Better output than eight humans. Because the agents don't drop context on handoffs. They don't forget what was decided in last week's meeting. They don't have their own interpretation of the brand voice.
This is what I call the constructive fallacy of departments.
We were told in every business book that companies had to be structured a certain way. Departments. Hierarchies. Specialists. That whole model is about to get blown apart.
I'm watching it happen in my own company. We run a portfolio of 24 software products with 20 people. Our target is a billion in revenue with no more than 50 people. I’ve set this crazy goal recently and started to say it out loud daily. Watch this space it will happen. Traditional companies would need 500 to do what we're doing. Maybe more.
The math works because of three things. First, we hire people who can go wide. A generalist who's 80% of the way there on several topics will run circles around a specialist using no AI at all. Second, we compress the knowledge work inside each function using AI before we ask anyone to span multiple functions. You go deep first, then go wide. Third, the agents handle the cognitive load that used to require headcount.
I was at an event last week where a founder told me his team has built a system where internal conversations about bugs and feature requests automatically get fed into AI, which writes the specs and code, and then hands it to the dev team for review and deployment. The entire company contributes to the product roadmap without knowing they're doing it.
That's not a department. That's a nervous system.
Here's where it gets real for us. Our owner sent a pointed email last week about a concept he calls the takeoff loop. One person at one of his other companies, armed with a solid knowledge base and AI agents, outperformed an entire marketing agency. An agency we were paying millions. The one person produced better content, faster, with more consistency. Because they had the context. The agency didn't.
Every time you hand work to a new person, context gets dropped. It is the number one failure point of every organization. The bigger the company, the worse communication gets. You cannot have everybody on the same page. It's impossible. Unless the "everybody" is one person and a fleet of agents who never forget anything.
I'm not saying departments disappear next quarter. I'm saying the companies that figure out how to compress eight roles into one person plus agents will operate at a speed that departmentalized companies cannot match. And once that gap opens, it doesn't close.
We're going to be the first ones to get there. And we're going to stub our toe 900 times doing it. That's how we operate. But someone has to go first.
FITFO moment of the week: Look at your org chart. Pick one department. Count the roles. Now ask yourself: if one person had the right context and the right AI agents, how many of those roles could compress into one seat? Don't act on it yet. Just sit with the number. It'll keep you up tonight.