A human, if needed
(This is an English adaptation of my Italian essay Un umano, se serve.)
Every time a new model ships, the feed fills up with reviews. "I tried it. Here are my impressions." Screenshots, homegrown benchmarks, verdicts.
I don't understand what feels special about chatting with the same model a hundred million other people have access to. It's like reviewing electricity.
To be clear: I'm not saying models don't matter. They matter to the point that any frontier LLM is, frankly, already magic. I'm saying the opposite: it's precisely because they're magic available to everyone, at the same price, on the same day, that they've stopped being an interesting topic. When everyone has the same capability, capability stops being the variable.
The variable is what you build around it.
The question I care about
The question I care about isn't which model is best this month. It's what this technology does to organizations. And there I see something specific, something I think is still underrated.
Today companies "adopt AI": they take the existing org chart — people, roles, hierarchies — and bolt tools onto people. A copilot for the developer, an assistant for marketing, a chatbot for support. The human stays the default executor; the AI assists.
The AI-native company of tomorrow will do the exact opposite: an agent for every role, and a human if needed.
The inverted org chart
This isn't a provocation. It's the logical consequence of where we already are. If an agent covers the first pass at the code, the first draft of the report, the first response to the customer, the role is no longer a person with a tool: it's an automated process with an escalation point. The org chart inverts. The human stops being the workforce and becomes the layer of judgment — the one you escalate to when judgment actually changes the risk.
That changes very concrete questions. "Where do we need hands" becomes "where do we need judgment." And judgment isn't hired, it's accumulated. The people who move up are the ones who have already seen the failure modes, who can tell a plausible output from a correct one, who know when to stop the machine. Thresholds, review, escalation stop being decorative compliance and become the actual design of the organization.
The flip side
There's a flip side too, and it needs saying: an agent per role without a real escalation path isn't an organization, it's automation hiding complexity. And the human "if needed" only works if, when needed, they're actually there — with the context, the authority, and the time to intervene. Otherwise you've built an extremely fast factory with an alarm bell nobody hears.
The agent executes. The human responds — in both senses: they respond when needed, and they answer for the consequences.
Everything else — which model, which benchmark, which review — is noise.
