AI Is Making Verification the Bottleneck for Companies - Harvard Business Review

Summary.

Hierarchy does more than route information; it also verifies: deciding what information means, what deserves the firm’s attention, which outputs can be trusted, and which are worthSomewhere in your company today, an expert rejected a perfectly plausible answer. A controller caught a revenue figure that counted deferred bookings. A security engineer blocked a release that passed every test but would have handed an AI agent write access to the production database. That override, escalation, or reversal is the most valuable data your firm produces. If you record enough of those moments and use them, alongside everything else your firm knows and measures, to train an AI model that learns from each correction, you could, in theory, eliminate the need for managers to route information and coordinate action. In doing so, execution gets turbocharged by automation. You might even be able to eliminate hierarchy altogether.