If the first question for leaders and investors is where AI actually belongs in a business, the next may be more disruptive: what happens to the organization once you put it there?
Ask most leaders how their company is organized and they will describe a familiar set of functions: accounting, account management, sales, operations. It feels like the natural shape of a business. But the functional org chart is really a solution to a problem. As companies grew, no single person could hold enough context to understand the entire business, so work was divided into increasingly specialized teams.
AI is beginning to change that constraint. If it does, some operators believe the organizational structures built around it may change just as dramatically. Robert Root, Transformation Partner at Southfield Capital, is one of them. In a conversation with Kingsley Gate’s Alison Woodhead, he put it plainly:
“I have maybe a bit of a contrarian view. I do not think functions, work functions as we see them today, will exist in five years.”
Robert Root, Transformation Partner, Southfield Capital
It is a provocative claim. But Root is not arguing that companies will stop needing financial expertise, sales capability or operational judgment. The expertise survives. What may not survive is the assumption that it needs to sit inside the same functional containers we have used for decades. His argument is really about why those silos existed in the first place, and what happens when the constraint that created them begins to disappear.
Why the work got chopped up in the first place
Functions are a coping mechanism for scale. A founder, at the start, does every job. They sell the work, deliver it, invoice for it, and carry in their head the thousand data points that signal which customer wants what. That founder is a connected operating system of one, and what looks like gut instinct is really pattern recognition built from having personally touched every corner of the business.
Then the company grows, and no single person can hold all of it anymore. So the work gets divided:
accounting here, account management there, sales somewhere else. Specialization solves the capacity problem, but it creates another one. The connective tissue frays. Context that once lived in one founder’s head is scattered across departments, systems and handoffs, each holding only part of the picture. That fragmentation has consequences beyond efficiency. It can also dilute what made the company distinctive in the first place. The same arc plays out in consumer brands: distinctive at the start, increasingly homogenized as they scale, their character gradually sanded off in the name of process and consistency.
The functional org chart, in other words, was never the goal. It was the best available answer to a hard limit on how much context one operator could carry. We organized expertise into silos because we had no practical way to preserve a connected view of the business at scale. The next stage may not be a return to founder-led businesses, but a move toward what Root calls “system-led” ones: organizations capable of preserving the founder’s connected view without requiring the founder to personally carry it.
How connected workflows rebuild the founder’s view at scale
The underappreciated capability in this wave of AI is not any single flashy feature. It is the ability to connect work, data and decisions that used to sit in separate functions, and in doing so recreate something closer to the founder’s connected view at the scale of an entire company. AI does not just make each silo more efficient. It begins to make the seams between them less necessary.
The fleet-management business makes it concrete. Historically, three separate teams touched a single forklift. One checked whether maintenance invoices complied with the contract, one paid the invoices, and one advised the customer on what to buy or lease. Three functions, three systems, three handoffs. Viewed as a task, paying an invoice is something to automate. Viewed as part of the customer journey, that same invoice is information that can improve the next maintenance decision, vendor decision or equipment purchase.
Connected through AI, that work can become one continuous flow organized around the asset the customer actually cares about. Every touch of the machine, whether in sales, accounting or account management, draws from the same context. The internal work starts to mirror how the customer sees the job: keep the fleet running at the lowest possible cost. The customer never cared where accounting ended and account management began. Why should the company?
“I do not start with the lens of driving efficiency. That is boring to me. Cost savings is not a strategy. It is a means to an end. So, get really clear on what you want your endpoint to be.”
— Robert Root – Transformation Partner at Southfield Capital
That reframing is the heart of the argument. Organize around the outcome the customer is paying for rather than the function performing each individual task, and the departmental boundaries that once made scale possible start to look more like scaffolding than permanent architecture.
Perhaps counterintuitively, the companies best positioned to make this leap may not be the largest. Smaller, founder-led businesses historically lacked the resources to build sophisticated technology infrastructure, but they also carry less institutional friction. As the cost of the technology falls, their relative simplicity can become an advantage: fewer layers, fewer legacy systems and a greater ability to redesign the work from scratch.
Front of house, back of house, and the rise of “automagical” work
If traditional functions begin to dissolve, something still has to organize the work. Root sees a structure far simpler than today’s departmental map: customer-facing work on one side and customer enablement on the other, with more of the clerical and administrative activity between them happening automatically.
The expertise does not disappear. But much of the work required to move information, secure approvals and coordinate between specialists may no longer need to be organized as a function at all.
“All of that is going to get handled automagically. Yes, we just made that word up.”
Robert Root, Transformation Partner, Southfield Capital
A home-services example shows what that could look like. One business that advises HVAC and plumbing contractors on how to run their books found that customers increasingly wanted it to simply handle the accounting for them. Rather than recreate a traditional back office, the company built an AI-first accounting solution around the technician in the field. On a job site, the technician diagnoses a system and tells their phone, “I need a two-ton compressor and this duct work.” The system can respond: warehouse or job site, delivered by tomorrow at 5 p.m. What once ran through an office manager, an approval queue and a two-day wait becomes part of the technician’s workflow.
The important point is not that accounting got faster. It is that the technician never had to leave the customer journey to make the back office work. No function was optimized. The journey was.
What this means for how you build a team
The practical takeaway is not to abolish the org chart tomorrow. It is to stop treating functional boundaries as sacred and to start designing around the customer’s definition of the work. The transition will be uneven. The adoption curve has not yet hit its steepest slope, and companies will take three steps forward and a few back as they figure out what works.
But the direction matters, because it changes what “good” looks like in a leader. Deep expertise will still matter. Increasingly, though, so will the ability to see beyond a function: to understand how decisions in operations affect the customer, how commercial choices show up in delivery, and how technology and data can connect work that previously belonged to different teams.
The strongest executives may therefore become harder to categorize neatly. The future may favor leaders who have built depth by repeatedly crossing functional boundaries, rather than those whose careers have remained entirely within one vertical lane.
The question becomes less, “How big was your function?” and more, “What outcome did you own, and how many boundaries did you have to cross to improve it?” Curiosity, systems thinking and the ability to operate across traditional lanes become more valuable alongside functional depth.
There is a broader prize as well. Scale has historically come with a degree of homogenization. As context fragments across functions, systems and layers of management, companies can lose some of the character and responsiveness that made them distinctive in the first place.
If AI can help reconnect that context, businesses may be able to scale without sanding off what made them worth building, or worth buying, in the first place.
Related reading
This article is part of a Kingsley Gate Insights series drawing on a conversation between Alison Woodhead and Robert Root. Quotes are used with permission.
References
Southfield Capital / Nasdaq Trade Talks, “Integrating AI into Private Equity and Investment Banking Operations,” April 2026.
Harvard Business Review, “How Much Time and Energy Do We Waste Toggling Between Applications?”, August 2022.
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