Teamwork in the AI age: Pods, clusters, flocks

Team structures need to adapt as AI agents and humans increasingly work together in smaller structures, or pods. A pod is a hybrid team of humans and AI that will also include people outside of the company.

At Constellation Research's Connected Enterprise 2026, teamwork was a core theme. How will humans work with AI agents and what structures are needed to produce AI exponential outcomes?

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Here's a look at the themes that'll impact the future of teamwork.

Organizations will have to be reordered into smaller teams. Pods are one format. Dr. David A. Bray, Distinguished Fellow and Chair of the Accelerator with the Alfred Lee Loomis Innovation Council at the non-partisan Henry L. Stimson Center, said in a talk that organizations will organize into clusters and flocks. Put those words together and you'll get a sense for how some of these new organizations will perform at first.

The hard design issue will be the handoffs. Doug Marinaro, CEO of Riptide, AI currently handles the easy stuff and the open question is how the handoff will happen between the different parties. "One of the most interesting aspects is how does the handoff happen between the different parties that are going to be involved," said Marinaro, who added that the AI can simply escalate or pass context to a human. The AI agent could also communicate with the other humans too.

AI adds time but has to be additive. Ron Friedman, Ph.D., an author and award-winning social psychologist who specializes in human motivation, said:

"When AI first came out, came on the scene, we all assumed it was going to shorten work. And what we're finding is actually life-threatening workday. The average team is now added three hours a week to their work week because of AI, and it's because AI serves to make the individual faster, but it makes teams slower."

"We've given everyone a content creation bazooka, and when everyone is creating way more content, it still takes the same amount of time for your teammates to consume it. Beyond that, a lot of that's work slop, and that takes time to interpret and to fix."

"The leaders have to be able to look at where AI is just adding time and not adding value, and so they're constantly questioning. They're asking not necessarily where can we use AI more. They're asking where is AI actually worth adding."

Compensation will be an issue. It's currently unclear whether teams will get a token budget that's near the equivalent of a number of full-time employees. Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller said AI agents will be part of the budget, but the math will get harder with physical AI and robots.

The prevailing theme is that compensation will have to be restructured to account for AI agents.

Karthik Krishnamurthy, CEO Ascendion, is thinking ahead. He said engineer pay has to change to ensure that outcomes not outputs are delivered. At Connected Enterprise 2026, Krishnamurthy said firms want to be paid on outcomes but still pay staff for hours: 80–85% fixed base and 10–15% variable. He's proposing 50% base and 50% variable, plus profit sharing on each project. "You got to start paying engineering people like salespeople: 50% base, 50% variable, and start to create a structure where you do profit sharing at a project level," he said.

Culture between humans and AI agents. The biggest question about AI-driven companies is culture.

Chris Deaver, Principal of BraveCore and author, made the case that culture will be a company's biggest differentiator because AI technology will be commonplace and a commodity. Deaver, who has seen the impact of culture and co-creating products at Apple and Dell, said: "The main challenge with AI adoption. It's your culture. What is the differentiator? It's people powered AI, so it's converging the best of technologies and humanities. AI can do a lot of things. It can get things done. But the brain trust really helps decide what's worth doing, what matters."

In a follow-up, Deaver said culture on teams with AI agents and humans is a work in progress.