AI Is Killing the Org Chart: Luke Girgis on Why Companies Won’t Need as Many Workers

What happens when a company can grow revenue without growing payroll?

On this episode of ⁠The Money Path⁠, host ⁠Todd M. Schoenberger⁠, CEO of ⁠CrossCheck Media Inc.⁠, sits down with former CEO and bestselling author Luke Girgis, author of ⁠Death to the Org Chart⁠, for a provocative conversation about artificial intelligence, corporate productivity and what could happen to jobs as companies learn to accomplish more with dramatically smaller teams.

Girgis argues that the old relationship between growth and hiring is already breaking down. He says executives once viewed adding employees as evidence of success. Today, he increasingly views a rapidly expanding org chart with “extreme suspicion.” Drawing on his experience running businesses, Girgis says many companies aren't truly scaling when they add employees alongside revenue—they are simply “buying revenue with labor.”

And he has a striking real-world example. Girgis describes an operation he led as interim CEO that went from 30 employees and a $400,000 annual loss to three employees, break-even and moving toward profitability. He says the business simultaneously improved customer service, product quality, delivery times, conversion rates and email engagement.

But the implications for workers could be enormous.

Girgis says the hardest part may be entry-level employment. As AI automates more routine execution work, he says he increasingly wants experienced people capable of making decisions rather than employees performing lower-level busywork. His advice to young people is provocative: build something. Learn to make decisions, develop judgment and acquire what he calls “taste.”

That leads directly to the argument behind Death to the Org Chart. Girgis believes companies should stop organizing themselves around positions that need to be filled and instead map the workflows that need to be completed, using people, AI agents and technology around those workflows. He predicts that within a decade, the traditional org chart could look like an “ancient artifact of dying businesses.”

And the remaining human talent could become extraordinarily valuable. Girgis argues that as execution becomes cheaper, employees with exceptional judgment and taste could command substantially greater compensation because AI allows a small number of talented people to produce the outpu