AI Impact from the Ops seat

The AI headlines are about models, operators talk impact. The impact of AI extends beyond just numbers, it raises a fundamental question, how many people does it take to run a company.

Cristina Cordova, the Linear COO, runs a business with 25,000 paying customers on a team of 140. People assume it's 400. She is deliberate about why it isn't. "The way a lot of other companies try to accomplish that goal is by just bringing on more bodies," she said. "We've taken the tactic of saying, is this really a role that is absolutely needed right now?" Her line for the whole philosophy: "You can keep a really small team and have a very large, very impactful business. Those two things aren't one and the same."

This isn't only a software story. Eugene Polevoy runs Blue C Capital, a private equity firm, with one partner and two or three companies at a time. Not scalable, by design. What changed is how far two people can reach. "I can have a question at 9:00 a.m. about my net working capital," he said, "and by 9:03 a.m. I have an answer." The firm didn't get bigger. It got faster, and faster means fewer people can cover more ground.

So if headcount isn't the constraint anymore, what is? Every one of these operators lands in the same place. The scarce input is the quality of the question.

Erik Brooks built Ethos Capital around exactly that. He puts former CEOs and CIOs in the room during diligence. "We don't make anything," he said. "Our input to the process is information. If the questions are better, then the information you're going to get is better." Better questions, better information, better decisions. That perfectly mirrors the AI value chain: better data, better questions, better output.

Guy Diedrich, Cisco's Global Innovation Officer, said it from outside the deal world entirely. "When you have access to all of the information in the world at your fingertips, what's going to be the most important skill? It's asking the right questions." His teams have started designing around workflows instead of job descriptions, because the work now splits across people and AI.

AI is currently designing the future shape of companies, the staffing, the roles, and it will even impact the org chart as the needs for specialized departments and skills are eroded. In this way the ability to build great teams and find great talent will matter more than ever.

With AI the company can grow while the team stays flat. The measure has always been how much work can you get done. But it is now being shaped by how good of questions you can ask. This will be shaped by the people in the room.