For 150 years, every company had the same shape. That just became optional.

For 150 years, companies have shared the same basic shape: a pyramid of people moving information up and down. AI may make that structure optional.

Consider electricity.

It took nearly 30 years for factories to see real productivity gains after electric power became available. The reason is counterintuitive but instructive.

Early factories were designed around a single steam engine. Power was distributed through belts and shafts, forcing machines to cluster tightly. Layouts were dictated by the location of power, NOT by the flow of work.

When electric motors arrived, many operators simply replaced the steam engine with a central electric motor. The architecture stayed the same and therefore productivity barely moved.

The breakthrough came when factories were redesigned so each machine had its own motor. Suddenly, layouts could follow the logic of the work itself. Factories spread out, workflows improved, and productivity surged.

We are at a similar inflection point with AI.

Most organizations are layering AI onto structures built for a different “power source”: hierarchical pyramids, functional silos, and management layers optimized for information routing. Then they question why the returns are modest.

That is substitution. What this moment demands is reinvention.

Our JLL Future Vision team recently spent time in San Francisco and Bengaluru to understand what this redesign looks like in practice (link in comments).

Three patterns stood out:

1\ The human role is becoming MORE valuable, not less.

As AI absorbs routine tasks, what remains is judgment, trust, and creative synthesis. The market is already reflecting this shift. PwC’s analysis of nearly a billion job postings shows wages rising twice as fast in AI-exposed industries. As tools improve, differentiation moves to how people use them.

2\ The pyramid is flattening into a network.

Much of middle management exists to move and translate information. This is an area where AI is highly effective. Those layers are thinning and the shift is also visible across firms. Even Apple (the most vertically integrated company on Earth) is integrating Google’s Gemini to enhance Siri.

3\ Location is being decided by the full AI “stack.”

Power is still the anchor BUT it now sits alongside taxes, incentives, data rules, and AI regulation. Early “agent havens” like Argentina’s non‑human corporations proposal and Meta+Reliance’s 168 MW AI data center in India show how these forces are converging.

Just as factories once clustered around physical power sources, AI workloads are clustering around energy-rich environments.

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A century ago, “we run on electricity” was a slogan, until organizations redesigned around it.

“AI-powered” is today’s equivalent.

Substitution delivers incremental gains. Reinvention changes the operating model.

And we have the tools and the agency to lead this change. Until next time,

Ram — 

Ram Srinivasan

MIT Alum | Author, The Conscious Machine | Global Future of Work and AI Adoption Leader published in Business Insider, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, MIT Executive Viewpoints and more.

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Disclaimer:

Ram Srinivasan currently serves as an Innovation Strategist and Transformation Leader, authoring groundbreaking works including "The Conscious Machine" and the upcoming "The Exponential Human."

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