The Death of Organizational Charts in the AI Age

Traditional organizational charts are strangling AI adoption. Ruslan Tovbulatov, CMO of Gloat, makes a compelling case for why companies must radically rethink their approach to work structures if they want their AI strategies to succeed.

TLDR:

• The org chart was built for the industrial revolution's command-and-control management style
• AI implementation requires looking beyond job titles to focus on tasks and workflows
• Retitling roles (e.g., content manager to content orchestration) creates the right mindset shift
• AI removes limiting beliefs about capabilities – anyone can design, write, or code with AI assistance
• Internal talent marketplaces allow work to be organized around outcomes rather than job descriptions

The fundamental problem? We're attempting to force cutting-edge AI capabilities into organizational models designed during the railroad era. These 19th-century hierarchies, with their rigid job titles and siloed departments, simply can't accommodate the fluid, task-oriented nature of effective AI implementation. When companies focus on what job titles they're replacing rather than what tasks need technological support, AI initiatives inevitably falter.

Ruslan advocates for a shift from traditional management to work orchestration. This means moving beyond static job descriptions to dynamic roles where employees coordinate between human capabilities and AI tools. Content managers become content orchestrators. Designers become design orchestrators. These aren't mere semantic changes but fundamental mindset shifts that empower employees to leverage AI as an amplifier of their talents.

Perhaps most excitingly, this approach democratizes previously specialized skills. No longer must someone say "I'm not a designer" or "I can't code." With AI assistance, these capabilities become accessible to anyone with the right orchestration mindset. This creates unprecedented opportunities for employee growth and organizational agility.

Companies like Standard Chartered and Schneider Electric are already demonstrating the power of this approach, using internal talent marketplaces to assemble teams based on skills and interests rather than job titles. Projects that once took years now complete in weeks. And as AI agents become increasingly capable teammates, even smaller organizations can benefit from this work orchestration approach.

Ready to reimagine your organization for the AI era? Start by questioning your assumptions about hierarchy, empowering your teams to orchestrate rather than just execute, and focusing relentlessly on work outcomes rather than organizational structure. Your AI strategy and your company's future may depend on it.

Read -  The Death of the Org Chart: Why AI Will Fail Without This One Change 

Chapters

• 0:00 The Death of Org Charts
• 4:23 Mindset Shift: From Titles to Tasks
• 6:31 Content Orchestration vs. Content Management
• 10:18 AI as Amplifier, Not Replacement
• 16:21 Reverse Mentorship in the AI Era
• 21:22 Work Orchestration and Internal Marketplaces
• 27:02 Making Talent Marketplaces Work for All
• 31:15 The Future of Human-AI Teams

Transcript

Kieran Gilmurray: 0:04

Lots are saying AI is radically transforming hiring and work, but Ruslan has gone a step further and wrote about the death of the organizational chart, why AI will fail without this one change, and said that organizations are trying to force 21st century AI into 19th century job structures, and it's not working. And if you want your AI strategy to succeed, you need to do one thing that most leaders are afraid to consider Ignore your organizational chart. Ruslan welcome, this is quite a big statement. You're arguing that org charts are dead. They should be killed. Ai adoption has changed all that. What's the most challenging thing or the most damaging thing about how traditional hierarchies are blocking AI success?

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 0:54

Well, first, fun to connect with you, ciaran. You're putting out great content. It's always fun to brainstorm and share with people that are pushing the industry and even society forward in a positive way. Yeah, I got a lot of love and a lot of interaction on this take, if you will, but for me it's not very much a hot take.

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 1:14

I think it's just reality where you know we've built our companies for all of the right reasons at the time, but on a 150-year-old operating principle, which is the organizational chart. And so in my article you principle, which is the organizational chart, and so in my article, you know, I take the whole history of where this all began and you know, in the railroads in America and some of the first examples of what an org chart looked like. And it really was built for just a different era of business right and it was on the cusp of the industrial revolution. We needed the ability to communicate efficiently, to have almost a top-down command and control type of management style, and it really worked when you have people on the factory floors or in remote offices in the railroad system. But in our new modern day of work, even before AI, we were in teams and Slack and collaborating across time zones.

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 2:06

There was already something fundamentally breaking at the seams, and AI, I think, is just accelerating all of that. We'll get into that, but just one short example there is just when you start implementing actual AI into your team everyone will go through the same experience we have working with customers, but also even by myself on my marketing team you start realizing that the only way to make AI work, whether it's co-pilots or agentic workflows, is by asking not what is the job title you're replacing, but actually what are the tasks that we need technology to support with, or what are the workflows we want it to do. And to do that, well, you simply have to look beyond job titles and the traditional org chart to make AI effective. So that's at the core kind of thesis. We can chat more about all the details there, but yeah, I really fundamentally believe it and see it every day and it's just accelerating with AI.

Kieran Gilmurray: 2:59

Well, that's a cool bit because you're actually living it inside of the company. But I want to delve a little bit deeper. Despite saying, look, org charts are redundant in the main, in your org chart, in your article, you actually replaced job titles as well. So content manager went to content orchestration. So, moving beyond semantics, what changes in mindset, skill sets, daily execution does this AI shift demand? So what does a typical Tuesday afternoon look like, inside of Gloat, for example?

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 3:33

It's a great question and I think it's worth saying to anyone that's listening that I'm not saying any of this stuff is easy, right? This is not something that changes overnight and you just kill your org chart and your hierarchies. I think this is important for us to start questioning some of the assumptions that we've built things around so that we can make those improvements. And the truth is, I don't know all of the answers yet. I don't think anyone does, even the latest frontier model builders, you know. I think every single day, Anthropic and OpenAI have a new view on where this is all heading and on the time horizons. But what I will say is that there are very practical things that I do think every leader needs to do and that we're practicing.

Kieran Gilmurray: 4:11

Tell me some of those things that you're going to implement, because you mentioned about and it's not, we have to be clear to the audience replacing people. It's about amplifying human edge here and getting three times the output with fewer people. And again, I know you're not advocating for fewer people and getting rid of them. Tell me Tuesday afternoon.

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 4:30

Yeah, yeah, sorry, and I got cut off. So yeah, I think the first just kind of setting the scene of you know, things are changing rapidly. I think we all have to kind of explore and learn together and it's not easy. But I think there are a couple of things I think every leader needs to do. And the first thing is mindset you use the word. I think that's absolutely critical is just to understand kind of what you said, where you need to kind of decide what the role of AI is going to be in your organization.

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 4:52

And the reality is there is some debate there. I think some are approaching it as a cost-cutting measure and hey, if you have to do it that way, and that's what the business calls, I'm not going to judge anyone for making tough decisions in their business. I think what I really want to do and encourage leaders to think about is not the reduction playbook but an augmentation playbook, and what I mean by that is how do we actually take all of the great work that people can do and just amplify it? And we really believe that We've launched something called the Exponential Workforce at Gloat recently and the idea behind that is we believe that every single person like ai, can really help you accelerate and do some of the minutiae, but then really lean into your talents and amplify all that. So to put that into practice, one of the first things I wanted to do and I think every organization should is to retitle our people, and why I did that was to get the right mindset in every individual that hey, if you're working on content or design, you're no longer a content writer or a strategist and you're no longer just a designer. You are actually an orchestrator now strategize to outline, to write, to copy, edit and proofread, to even then design and create video snippets out of that to promote the content right. So this old world where you might have three, four, five people in an assembly line working on content, it just no longer has to exist. And I actually think that can be very empowering. And I see it firsthand where, if you allow someone to think of themselves as this orchestrator of not just their own work but also the tools at their disposal, now, all of a sudden, the content person is learning, not just Claude for writing, but even you know, we use Descript for video and doing, you know, using other tools to do social posts and Canva for design, with templates that were created, so it just opens up this whole new world for people.

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 6:53

And the last thing I'll end on, and then we can talk more about it too I've made a bunch of different changes, but I think the other thing that I think mindset-wise and also practicality is it kind of removes these barriers that people always had, which were, I think, limiting paradigms and limiting beliefs. Like, how many times have people said, oh, I'm not a designer, or I'm not good at designer, oh, I can't really write, or I can't even code, I'll never be able to code. Well, actually, now you can. That's the beauty of it.

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 7:18

If you're hungry and you want to try something, all of a sudden AI allows you to do things that I think even just a year ago you would say, oh, I can't do that, and now I think everyone can. So those are some of the both the mindset and then some of the practical changes we're making. And then, very tactically, we're also doing some things of just getting the right tools in hand and how we're doing upskilling within the team and with customers, and then a lot of obviously we're thinking about agents and all that. But we'll get there.

Kieran Gilmurray: 7:47

I was gonna say you're thinking of a lot, so just digging in a little bit more. So this isn't about replacing people, this is about augmenting them, which I find tremendously refreshing, because over the last two or three decades when I've been working with businesses, the focus is on operational efficiency. You know, actually bring roles together, strip out people inside of those roles, or units of people as they're. They're horribly described, despite the fact they're saying their talent is their most prized assets and their employees are the greatest things. But how do you get people to that mindset and how do you get a company to that position?

Kieran Gilmurray: 8:24

Because lots of people are coming out of college, university, whatever it is, having been through the sausage machine, for want of a better phrase, and the sausage machine is designed to recreate structures of 200 years ago. Everyone's the same, everybody has to do nine to three, nine to five, whatever the road method is. We look for efficiencies, but very few think of 10X scaling. Everything is against what you're describing education system, university system, college system, even people's mindset, where some will be listening to what you're saying, who will be tremendously excited, like myself, and others will be listening, going. Actually, that's not job enrichment, that's job enlargement, and they're asking me to do more.

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 9:06

Yeah, I think it opens up so many philosophical questions, societal questions that you know. I think there's going to be a whole you know this really is, I think, a structural change in the way everything is done, like you said, education systems, etc. I think we're going to have a lot of work to do as a society, as we like. Look at what are human AI teams. What does that mean? I think there's. For me, what I'm seeing is there's a short term and long term. I think we would be foolish to think that short term, there is not going to be disruption on the you know, real jobs and people's like impact happening on people's jobs, and we see it honestly in the headlines over the past few weeks every day. And the thing that concerns me sometimes is it's the people that are on one week saying how great AI will be and then doing some of the cuts the next week, and I think there's just a natural progression there where, in the short term, there will be displacement. But I think in the long view, just like changes in society in the centuries prior, just like changes in society in the centuries prior, we will all figure this out and humans will be in a really good place. There are a lot of jobs over the history of humanity that no longer need to exist right, and the one that's always talked about is, you know, the replacement of bank tellers with ATMs and everyone that followed that it actually created way more jobs for the foreseeable future than what they thought would happen. You know toll booth collectors, people going into coal mines like whiskey jobs that existed for years and years. I think society evolves and in the long view, I think it's going to be great. I think in the short term, there will certainly be some displacement. I think the big question right now that I honestly don't have the answer to is that first kind of five years in the workplace. What happens to those jobs, because there's some data suggesting that you know they're the hardest hit right now. I think that's going to be a really big question for organizations. I will say one thing that I really think is important for education systems, and we spend a decent amount of time thinking about this too, although there's only so much we can do because we work with largest enterprises. I think other people need to really take this on the mantle.

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 11:12

But the CEO of DeepMind said something really interesting this past week. Even he said the most important skill for the next generation will be learning to learn, and I actually think we need to revisit that in our education systems. I heard recently something that um from a bunch of parent friends you know have teen teens and and going to college and they're actually still schools. That um are actually not allowing kids to use ai and I think that is super dangerous. Like they are actually going allowing kids to use AI and I think that is super dangerous.

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 11:41

Like they are actually going to be the ones that are going to educate all of us on how to be using these tools. So, if we go back to one in education system, making sure we're empowering, enabling, like my hope is that the next generation coming into my workforce is educating me on these tools right Versus the reverse. And secondly, I think this idea of this hunger, desire to learn, empowering them, encouraging them it's like ability to actually learn and growth mindset I think is going to be more important than ever, rather than specific trade skills or specifics, like empowering generalists in a way that we haven't in a long time, I think are the big opportunities for us. But I think we're all just starting to learn that and figuring it out together.

Kieran Gilmurray: 12:22

Yeah, I think that's a big fear that I'm seeing at the moment, like numbers of years ago. Stem used to be the only game in town, a game to local universities, and some of the humanities and social sciences were actually removed, much to my personal disgust at the time, because I think we don't have people actually understanding and questioning what we're doing anthropologists, sociologists and everyone else. I think we're really in trouble now. We really are in trouble because, as AI steps in and does the logic, I think we're there. There is going to be more problems than we actually understand at the moment.

Kieran Gilmurray: 12:51

I think we're sleepwalking into something we don't see. I have to say, I personally get frustrated, you know, when I see all these statistics about the young generation being the most impacted, because I'm sort of seeing a mix. You know, there's tariffs, there's uncertainty, there's government change, right, you know, name your country as well, and I think we'll talk ourselves into doing something as well, where, if everybody believes that no one is hiring, you know, young, young adults and all of a sudden we'll not hire them.

Kieran Gilmurray: 13:16

And I noticed I give you an example Russell, my son's uh 18 and he works for me now. Uh, he came into the business. I gave him work to do, thinking it would take him days to do it. He went yeah, I've done that. And I went. What he says I've done it. You know, and I work with automation innovation all the time. You went, yeah, I used makecom, I got lovable out, I did a bit of replete, I got zappyappy up, I wrote some prompts, so now I don't have to do any of that. It was really boring, so now I'm doing the bits that will add value to both of us. You know what I mean. You're sort of going. That's who I need in my business.

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 13:45

I love that so much.

Kieran Gilmurray: 13:47

I think that's spot on.

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 13:49

I think that's spot on. I think that's part of the mindset shift that so much of this thing and we see it right in the news reports of the 95% failed pilots, which is questionable methodology there but so much of it actually comes down to the mindset that we're operating under. And I think you're totally right where one of the things we find working with Gloat and with the companies we work with is we have something on the platform where people can get matched to mentors and one of the fastest growing areas we saw as technology continues to evolve even before AI was reverse, mentorship was becoming more common than traditional mentorship. What I mean by that is older people wanted to get mentored by younger people.

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 14:28

I think people sometimes forget that where this if the next generation coming into the workforce is exactly like your son, they're literally like, whether the schools allow it or not, are on GPT and Claude and lovable and replant and you know, and, yes, they're on makecom and and using all these tools that some workplaces aren't even allowing yet. So I think there's going to be such an opportunity for the companies that actually invest in the young talent and say we're actually going to hire more. They're going to, I think, see outsized returns, and I think you're absolutely right we have to be really careful about convincing ourselves of a certain narrative. I'm with you completely. If we do the right things and empower people to do their best work, with AI as this amplifier, I think the new generation is going to be the biggest asset in our workforces.

Kieran Gilmurray: 15:16

Yeah, we're going to violently agree in this. It'll be interesting to hear what the audience thinks as well. And I love that concept of reverse mentorship because that's something you know I have to say. A CMO will talk about typical, you know, groups or boomers love to mentor. You know what I mean. The millennials coming in, gen Z alphas, love to be menteed. But that's quite a shift for organizations in itself.

Kieran Gilmurray: 15:39

I noticed I was brought into a cyber company. I was the adult in the room, it's not to say the others weren't, but slightly older. And actually Gen Z was intimidated by the fact that I was older and I got by the clinches. You know age commons every day, all harmless, you know what I mean, I'm not offended in the slightest. But they really struggle to actually reverse mentor, you know, and that's something.

Kieran Gilmurray: 16:01

So I wonder how we teach them to teach us when we're desperate to learn, because I don't care who I learn from, I don't care who manages me, I don't care the age or anything else it's, I'm focused on outcomes and outputs and whatever you can show me, I'll consume it at a rate of knots. So so how do we get every generation? Because we can't suddenly bring in a group of Gen Zs and go okay, now we're going to transform industry. How do we get multi-generational talent all working together, all productive, with all of these tools? Because Gen Z can't shoulder the responsibility for a quick make and a quick Zapier, and three agents later and you've got Procter Gamble reinvented.

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 16:43

I love that it actually goes back to where we started this conversation. I think that's where all roads to me lead to this idea of the org chart versus this work chart. And what we find is you're totally right. If you just say, hey, here's mentoring, go find someone. It doesn't work, it's awkward. It's like you know people, some people like networking events, some vast majority don't. It's like super awkward.

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 17:07

But if you actually revolve all of this around the work and deconstructed work, then all of a sudden you're putting these relationships into the flow of something that's already like has to get done in the business. And what I mean by that is and then this is where we've had such success with Glow is when you start deconstructing jobs into the work to be done and the projects to be done within a company. You just assemble whatever team you need. You don't care. You stop asking are they a first year? Are they a 10th year? Are they? You know what generation they're in. You say this is the job that needs to get done. I need to assemble a team and all of a sudden you happen to have someone that might be two years into their job, matched with someone and you know in whatever role they might. That person might be leading that project, that project and someone that has expertise that's been at the company for 30 years might be contributing and that's where we actually see that authentic kind of growth of skills happening, and we really believe that.

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 18:05

I personally believe that the same problem is happening with how we do upskilling with GPT or makecom, whatever it might be. You're not going to teach someone by saying, hey, here's a learning course on it. You have to apply it to the flow of work, just like, I'm sure, your son right he probably learned it and applied it for a specific use case. I need to get something done. I'm going to do whatever it takes to get it done.

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 18:28

Sometimes that might be pulling in a person for advice, aka mentorship. Sometimes that might be actually saying, hey, I need help from you to do this work. Sometimes it might be an agent or a tool, and that's, I think, where the unlock becomes is if you think about the workflows and tasks that need to get done, assemble teams around that work and you ask the broader thing of teams like what is a team? If it's no longer confined to just your org chart, it starts allowing you to have all of these, you know the kind of interactions I just described, where you're assembling not just you know younger and older talent, but even agents and technology right alongside of your own skill set. I think that's the big unlock, if we can all solve it.

Kieran Gilmurray: 19:13

I think that goes back to your describing organizing around the work, not the job, because then if I'm organizing or, or a subtle difference, that one for me is organizing around the desired outcome. If I'm not focused on silo, if I'm not focused on title, if I'm not focused on you know, he or she who's been in the company longest speaks first and we all go with their word. But I'm focused on you know, customer outcome, business outcome and I work my way back and introduce methods and individuals and talent, and that talent can be digital human labor. I think that's a real focus. But how do firms make what sounds like or what you're describing, this internal talent marketplace, work, and how do we actually get this to resonate with business leaders when we're in danger of the pace of current work making even what we're describing now outdated before we even get to launch it and transition a business and a mindset and a culture and a technology stack and everything else?

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 20:17

I think that's where the idea of marketplace dynamics is so powerful where, you know, the marketplace kind of manages itself right Supply and demand. That's the beauty of it. And so when you, we actually we framed a little bit. You know, we started as an internal marketplace at Gloat, so we had a lot of experience launching this concept of, you know, people matching to jobs and projects within a company and very large scale. You know the HSBCs and Schneiders and Standard Chartered and MasterCard and Spotify really big enterprise. But what we learned in all of that is actually, it's informed, our evolution, where we actually just repositioned as a work orchestration platform and because the reason was because we realized that it wasn't about a marketplace of talent or opportunities. It was actually the core behind all of this was getting work done. It was actually about a marketplace for work and that, funny enough, when you apply marketplace dynamics with work at the core, everything moves faster. And I'll give some examples. You know, if you want to launch an ice cream brand, I've used this example for many years. I just love it. It's so simple.

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 21:28

What did you typically need to do at a cpg company? You needed to do consumer research. You probably needed a brand manager. That brand manager probably didn't exist, so you needed to first get the approval for the JD or the job rec. You go out and hire someone, they come in, they get the consumer research, then you need to figure out the supply chain. This takes months, if not years, to launch a new brand.

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 21:49

We've worked with companies that, just using a marketplace and a work orchestration platform, they just post the idea and the team assembles and they were able to launch this in weeks. Literally, this is not made up in weeks instead of years, and I see this all the time constantly. We had Standard Chartered has this amazing story we documented where they rebuilt their entire trading out like infrastructure platform and got down you know their the speed with which they were doing Forex trading by like two milliseconds from seconds. And all of that was done not by hiring new people, it was literally someone had some free time and a desire to do it, assemble the team from around the world, put it together and got it done.

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 22:37

So when you start thinking about this as like this marketplace of hey, let's empower every person in the organization to be able to post an idea of hey, this is the work I need to get done, you'd actually be surprised at how many people want to work in a different geo with a different team with you know, get exposed to new parts of the business that they've never been worked on before. And so the larger organizations they're sitting on so much talent even today Forget before they even launched agents and AI fully Just today. You're sitting on so much untapped talent and so many skills that I think if you apply this kind of idea of empower everyone to post work, assemble teams, get things done kind of idea of empower everyone to post work, assemble teams, get things done, you're going to see some amazing results, as I have at Glow with some of these amazing companies that we get to work with.

Kieran Gilmurray: 23:25

So one question on that. Then everybody might want to work for the sexy project, which means that the non-sexy but essential or it might even result in a much higher outcome may not get done. So how have you accounted for that inside of the business or Standard Charter or Schneider or the others?

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 23:44

Yeah, you know it's a great question. One thing I actually always say is you know everyone and I'm a CMO. I'm biased, but marketing is a very important skill. I think it's actually increasingly important to an age of AI. How you position something, how you talk about it, matters a lot, and the truth is I think any project being done in the company can find the right person. That's again the beauty of a marketplace concept is you'd always be surprised. I just you know bringing it to real life. We were just house hunting in New York here and we saw a place that was totally overpriced. I couldn't imagine anyone living in it and my wife and it was basically got off the market in like a week. And I told my wife I was like who would buy that place? She said when you have a marketplace, there's always a buyer for everything, and I think that actually occurs in organizations. I actually thought about that for what we do at Gloat and the marketplace concept within companies.

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 24:39

You'd be surprised that what seems unsexy to one person might be exactly what a person wants to work on or try in their next life. You know, for some people working with a marketer would be a nightmare. The marketing team. They just make up stuff. They're just telling narratives For others, even from product or engineering. That's exactly what they might want. I want to build my marketing skills and vice versa. Someone might not want to work on the messy data infrastructure boring projects behind the scenes or the finance team working on some accounting projects. But you seriously, when you get to a certain scale, you just really can't predict, and I actually think there is a buyer for everything, including the work that needs to get done in the organization. But one of the things we help organizations with is you have to think about positioning and marketing, and in the right way for sure and that is part of the job of a poster of work you know whoever's positioning the work that they're doing. They need to sell it a little bit for sure.

Kieran Gilmurray: 25:36

Final question then is there a size of company where this starts to make sense? Because when I've worked in small companies, it wasn't called an internal marketplace, it was called we just needed the job done and therefore you just just learned, and with that came what I describe as gorgeous agility. And with it came, you know, that job enrichment that you wanted and I used to use the phrase in these organizations if you weren't scared, then we weren't aiming high enough and they're the ability to learn and to decide and to make decisions on the earth. That really made things work.

Kieran Gilmurray: 26:11

But once you got a little bit beyond that, everybody started to trip over each other, and that's when the, the, dare I say that the institutions, the, the hierarchies, the roles, the kpis, the okrs and everything else started to rear their gorgeous but ugly head, because then you got to the stage with the silo and the work and the process mattered more than the outcome. So somehow there's a, there's a golden goose here that's going to lay an egg and it's finding the right size of that goose. That's the one I think orgs may find difficult currently, before they start going. Yes, I want startup, I want marketplace, I want all this Sounds great, but so how do we, how do we reconcile the bottom? What are a couple of things that firms can do tomorrow morning just to get this journey started? So size and journey.

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 27:04

I think, a great questions and great commentary too, I think from the globe perspective, I'll tell you what's been most successful for us is we've had a lot of success with larger enterprises for sure. So you know, the 5,000 employees and above and I think part of that is kind of going back to what I was saying before where it just creates this supply and demand that just naturally exists at certain scale, where anyone can post a project and deconstruct it and post something on Glow, know, on Gloat, and then there will be people that can help. The interesting thing about what's happening with AI and also just my personal opinion of just having worked at companies both large and small you know, I was at Google when we were much larger and it's one of the reasons I really believed in what Gloat was doing, because even at Google, where there's famously 20% time, we never really got to scale that. It was only a small percentage of people that got to participate and really do 20% time. That was, of course, famously when people worked on a side project, but in most companies you don't get to do that. There's no system in place to really match people to the right ones. But when I saw smaller companies too. The ability where I just saw, but when I saw it, smaller companies too. The ability where I just saw crap, talent everywhere.

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 28:14

And I think, because of agents and AI, we're going to see smaller and smaller organizations benefit from this every single day, because now you're not just going to be confined to the supply and demand of humans in the org. There's now going to be agents that you just don't know exist in the company. And we actually already we have something in the platform We've enhanced. You know why we call it work orchestration is when you break down something into the work to be done. Now, even within Gloat, it doesn't just show you the people on your team and people outside of the team that can help you. It actually shows you the agents and then AI tools that can help you, and I think that's increasingly critical because even the tools that were not built as AI are very powerful teammates. What I mean by that is, if I have a design project, canva becomes a very powerful tool for me. That's not just technology anymore. I can talk to Canva. That's not just technology anymore. I can talk to Canva. They've built in AI in powerful enough ways where I can describe exactly what I need designed as a CMO who isn't even a designer, and it can design things for me. I can then use Gamma, which we have for slide deck creation at Gloat, to create slides. You go down the list. You can create videos with video resources, and then we have increasingly agents that can do things end to end, can create videos with video resources, and then we have increasingly agents that can do things end to end Like I need a case study written, I have a case study agent.

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 29:35

You know I need something that's spun up for, like a webpage. I can do that. I need account research done. I have an agent. So this idea that now even a you know a 10 person team having a place where work can kind of get deconstructed and then you can become an orchestrator of both people and tools, I think becomes, you know, much more relevant and a huge opportunity. So right now, short answer is larger organizations really benefit from it. I think tomorrow every organization should think about how they implement a more dynamic way of getting breaking down work, orchestrating it. But I think over over time we're going to see even 10, 20 you know person teams really benefiting from something like this yeah, I really like that.

Kieran Gilmurray: 30:17

It's interesting because, if I take my own company as an example, we have agents for a huge variety of things and I want less employees, not out of anything. I've managed teams of hundreds and thousands. I just don't want that anymore. I just want to manage a small, highly skilled team that gets excited by what they do. So again the same thing agents everywhere. I do think people will worry.

Kieran Gilmurray: 30:37

You know, agent, agent, and they sometimes put too high a bar in tech, put too, high a hurdle and I always say to people as I do exec aid or I talk to boards or whatever else, that how many calls have you been on where you've never met the person but you believe they are real because they're sitting on the end of a Teams, a Zoom or something else? They go all the time and then they go, but are they not real and you're going? Well, I don't know, they could be, they might not be. Stop worrying about the people and the technology worry about the work.

Kieran Gilmurray: 31:07

that from there. But if nothing today I totally adored our conversation but when you said earlier on, people sometimes are confused about CMOs and what they do. Today I've discovered you talk to Gamma and you talk to Canva. That must be what a CMO does.

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 31:23

I talk to all of these tools. Actually, that's one tip I would give every single person and individual. I think people haven't realized the power of voice on all of these tools. I was actually thinking about doing a post on this, because if you're not using voice on cloud or gpt or all that gemini, whatever ones you use, and you're including canva etc, you're getting like 20 of the value out of these tools. So, yeah, voice is very powerful. I think it's also the future of how we communicate to all these tools. Uh, but yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 31:49

Cmos do a lot of that and then some, but yeah if anyone wants to learn what we do on a day-to-day basis and anyone wants to talk about what I think the future of marketing orgs will be in an AI era. I'm happy to connect with anyone and everyone, so definitely.

Kieran Gilmurray: 32:02

That's another podcast that we need. So how do people connect with you, how do they find out a little bit more about yourself, the work you're doing, your research, gloat and everything else that we've spoken about today?

Ruslan Tovbulatov : 32:12

yeah, it wouldn't be a good cmo if I didn't encourage people to go to gloatcom just to learn more about what we do, because we're doing a lot of this work with organizations. But obviously we got pretty philosophical today, thinking about the future. So if anyone wants to follow my thinking on all of that, um, personally and what I'm doing on my own team, linkedin is always the best way, so just look me up on LinkedIn R-U-S-L-A-N. Ruslan T, ruslan Tavulatov. I'm sure there'll be a link. It's a mouthful, but hopefully you find me in one of the first results and just follow me and connect.

Kieran Gilmurray: 32:43

I'll add it into the notes of the podcast, the webinar and everything else that we turn this into Look absolutely brilliant. I'm a huge fan of your writing. I think the days of hierarchies or silos and everything else they should be gone. Organizations work, the end product, the customer whatever we want to call it need the agility that we've got. People are fed up being siloed and put into a box.

Kieran Gilmurray: 33:06

The technology and the toolings there, the desire of every generation to grow and to develop and to be part of creating something that matters, has existed throughout the millennia. Long may we continue to see that. So, my goodness, if it's marketplaces, ai, just mindset, I don't really care. I want work that's enjoyable, work that's fun, work that's meaningful, and I love what you've done, which has put your people at the core of what you're trying to do, because it's not just about technology, it's about great people as well, and I just sometimes do wonder if we got as excited and we spent as many dollars and wrote as many inches about great people as we do great technology. Imagine the workplace that we would create today.

Kieran Gilmurray: 33:47

Look everyone who's listening in. Thank you very much for listening. Until next time, create today. Look, everyone who's listening in. Thank you very much for listening. Until next time we'll see you online or somewhere on LinkedIn or all the other social media platforms that we're on brilliant. Thank you so much indeed. Have a wonderful day thank you so much.