The Company of Many Deputies

Why It Starts

The modern company does not eliminate workers so much as surround them with semi-autonomous counterparts. Finance runs cautious agents that hate variance, sales deploy aggressive ones that chase exceptions, legal maintains literal-minded blockers, and operations fields dozens of local optimizers with narrow charters. Meetings become shorter for humans but longer in machine time, as people review bundles of inter-agent disputes instead of making first-order decisions themselves. Corporate culture starts to reside in policy files and escalation ladders, because the personality of a firm now depends on how its deputies are trained to argue.

How It Branches

1. Falling inference costs let every department run its own always-on models instead of sharing a single enterprise assistant.
2. Teams tune those agents to departmental metrics, creating conflicting priorities that mirror and amplify office politics.
3. Routine cross-functional work is delegated to agent-to-agent negotiation because it is faster than scheduling human meetings.
4. Executives respond by redesigning governance around escalation thresholds, override rights, and audit trails for machine disputes.

What People Feel

At 8:55 a.m. in a glass meeting room in Sao Paulo, a procurement manager opens her dashboard to find that overnight her sourcing agent rejected a discount, her compliance agent blocked the appeal, and her human job for the morning is to choose which machine she wants to disappoint.

The Other Side

This model can speed decisions, preserve institutional memory, and give small firms capabilities once reserved for large bureaucracies. But it may also harden silos into software, making bad incentives more persistent because they are now automated, documented, and always awake.