TCS' Bajaj: Corporate structures will need to be rewritten due to AI

AI is a management innovation as much as a technological shift and company structures will have to be rewritten.

That's the main message from Amit Bajaj, President North Americas Tata Consulting Services, who spoke at Constellation Research's AI Forum in New York.

Bajaj said company structures today were designed for scaling for the industrial revolution. As AI makes specialist skills plentiful, the structure will have to change.

"AI has been spoken a lot in a technology context. To me, it's a great management innovation," said Bajaj. "Today the work is organized around us. Tomorrow we will be organized around work."

The next-gen corporate structure is likely to organize around jobs to be done instead of functions like sales, supply chain, finance and customer service. These corporate functions are often in silos and that creates friction.

Bajaj said corporations will need to define jobs that are full autonomous vs. shared with humans. A functional area like finance would still exist to build skills, but they wouldn't run the business day to day. Bajaj sees functions working as one agile team with business context being the glue between them.

The rewiring of corporate structures was a common theme and a trend to monitor. Other takeaways from Bajaj include:

• Undocumented context is a big barrier to autonomous AI. Much of what matters in a business lives in conversations and meetings that are never recorded. "Until that context gets captured, whatever system in place will not know what is happening," said Bajaj.
• However, capturing that undocumented context requires a trust infrastructure since employees worry about what they say can be used against them in evaluations. Bajaj wants rules modeled after GDPR for employees. "Capture the conditions under which this context can be used. Now it is not just personal information; it is everyone’s information," said Bajaj.
• AI mistakes need an agent business operating model. Bajaj noted that there is zero tolerance for errors from machines. Bajaj said checks that are used for human mistakes should also be applied to AI agents.
• The biggest gains from AI will be delivered via interdepartmental collaboration. "The biggest benefits of AI will come when you go across the organization, and I still see too few firms working as one firm," said Bajaj.

More from AI Forum:

• Personal AI assistants to proliferate and so will the governance headaches
• Agentic AI deployments: What you should, and shouldn't do
• Genpact's AI chief Vijayasankar: Don't forget process, talent debt in AI projects
• Veltris CEO Chandrana on vertical AI, industrial AI use cases