Have we become so comfortable with the organisation chart that we've stopped asking whether it works?
Below we explore what’s not working and a practical tool released last week which we should all be aware of and potentially using - the question is which department owns it, or are you going to finally rip-up the 20th century office rulebook? Let me explain…
Would you appoint a ‘Head of Paper’ to lead your growth strategy? It sounds odd. Yet we're comfortable appointing a ‘Head of Digital’ when digital runs through almost everything a modern business does. At what point does organising around the medium become an obstacle to the objective?
The business needs to understand its customers, give them a compelling reason to choose it and deliver on that promise. Doing that might involve a website, a conversation, a retailer, an app or an AI workflow. The strategy should decide which combination works.
Why do brands still choose a marketing agency or a technology partner as though we're picking a tribe?
Instead, we usually begin with the departments and suppliers we already have, then divide the problem between them. Marketing gets the message. IT gets the systems. Sales gets the target. Each receives a brief and measures its contribution. Then we ask both to deliver a seamless customer experience and act surprised when the seams show - the customer experiences whatever emerges between them. Yuck, it’s not good for the business or the customer, yet it happens all the time.
One founder put it to me less kindly: departments exist so the person at the top doesn't have to understand the work. Ouch! True?
The department as a habit
Has that way of organising work reached its limit? Take something as ordinary as helping a customer choose the right product. You need to understand what matters to them. The proposition has to make sense. Product information must be accurate, the communication (regardless of chosen medium) has to work, and the promises made before purchase must be delivered with production, delivery and service.
Every one of those decisions affects the same outcome. Yet we can spend more time negotiating who owns each part, having an inter-departmental meeting on the best ways of working together like the participants have never done a day's work before (and they’re all thinking… another WoW meeting - quick, run for the hills!). Great news if high attrition is a KPI in your organisation.
Or…. You could scrap the legacy office processes and improve the whole thing?
most websites were designed for a person arriving, browsing and deciding. Half the visitors now aren't people.
The alternative starts with strategy and expands to measurablity. That might be a small team with commercial, creative and technical expertise. For a focused objective, it might be one experienced person using AI to cover work that used to need several handovers, with specialists brought in where the task demands. Personally, ‘I’ (my agents) am happy to build an entire digital product with little involvement, and as I know what ‘agency-grade’ award-winning production looks like, Id’d say they did a scarily impressive job.
It could be argued anyone still nay-saying about AI (excluding creative judgement …for now) is just protecting their job, or self-worth? It is equally arguable to say the skills still matter (they do …for now). What is for sure, inter-departmental hierarchy matters considerably less.
Why now?
The Serious bit - Because human customers are now less than half the market...
Cloudflare's July report put automated traffic above 50% of what it measures. Humans accounted for less than half. Measured as requests across its network -automation covers many kinds of bots alongside AI systems, so your own site needs examining separately. Even so: most websites were designed for a person arriving, browsing and deciding. Half the visitors now aren't people.
AI makes this worth acting on rather than admiring. It gives capable people more scope to research, create, build and test. It also changes how customers discover businesses and make decisions. Both how the work gets done and what the work needs to achieve are moving at once.
An AI assistant comparing products for a potential customer needs access to accurate information. A crawler collecting content for model training raises different questions about value and control. Who should decide how the business responds?
“But we dont have a department for that?!”
The answer needs customer understanding, commercial judgement and technical knowledge. Handing it to whichever department happens to own the website is a narrow place to start.
Agencies should be asking the same question
Why do brands still choose a marketing agency or a technology partner as though we're picking a tribe? A commercial objective may need both sets of skills, plus capabilities neither supplier routinely provides. If the agency's service list defines the solution before the problem is understood, the business has inherited another boundary.
And the awkward question, from someone who has run agencies for most of my career: do agencies have a commercial interest in keeping disciplines apart? A blurred boundary is a smaller brief, or worse relevance slips.
This weeks latest tool is a place to practice the new world
No, not Jev! ...Fingerprint's new Bot Directory, released last week is a useful place to put this thinking to work. It's a public, searchable register of bots, crawlers and AI tools, showing who runs them, what they're for and whether they identify themselves. Read alongside your own traffic, it shows which automated visitors are arriving and which are being blocked. Fingerprint's Bot Directory
More usefully, it puts a real decision in front of the business that no single department can answer: which of these visitors do we want, and what should they find when they arrive?
Give someone responsibility for the outcome, the authority to coordinate changes and a clear way to assess progress.
I suggest start with an objective, such as helping potential customers and their AI assistants reach accurate product information. Bring together the skills needed to deliver it. Review access rules alongside the proposition and supporting content. Check that prices, specifications and service promises agree across your website and retailer listings. Test realistic customer questions and investigate the gaps.
Give someone responsibility for the outcome, the authority to coordinate changes and a clear way to assess progress. Then learn from it: which skills were needed, which tools helped, and where the existing structure delayed a decision. Use that evidence to organise the next piece of work better.
The uncomfortable truth?
The risk isn't that AI fails. It's that we use increasingly capable technology to move work faster between departments that no longer makes sense.The strongest form of this argument is that the org chart is the last part of the business nobody has redesigned for this AI-first (virtual) world.
