AI-isms: Power | Amy Kates | How to think about Power as AI redraws the lines

We spend our careers drawing lines. My team, my P&L, my data, my customers. Then agentic AI starts working across all of them, and the old question comes back sharper than ever: what happens to power?In this first episode of AI-isms, I sit down with organization designer Amy Kates to unpack how AI is redrawing the lines of power inside organizations. Amy is the author of six books on org design and operating models and the founder of Kates Kessler.Her core idea stayed with me - real power lives horizontally. That is where value gets created, and it is exactly where AI is now blurring the boundaries.What we get into:• Why organizational power is horizontal, not just vertical, and why the seams matter more as AI dissolves silos• Designing for outcomes instead of headcount when agents do the work• A real finance-versus-HR standoff over workforce planning, and how to redeploy capacity instead of just cutting it• Why AI is often a red herring for collaboration problems, and how Jay Galbraith's STAR model diagnoses the real issue: trust and metrics• Learning is greater than lurching: the honest answer to how long an org design should lastChapters00:00 Power in the age of agents01:33 Meet Amy Kates02:26 Why power lives in the horizontal seams10:35 Enter AI: the end of people equals power16:50 Case 1: Finance vs. HR and who owns workforce planning24:43 Case 2: Two leaders who won't share the data27:55 Why AI is a red herring for trust (the STAR model)34:10 The shelf life of an org design: learning over lurching37:25 How Amy actually uses AI in her life40:26 The AIisms I took from this oneThis is AI-isms, human rhythms in a synthetic world.