We met as classmates in the Henry Crown Fellowship at the Aspen Institute in 2022. Different careers, same observation. The world of work is about to be fundamentally different, and most companies are not ready.
Shama had just spent seventeen years building and running a marketing firm and was deep in the shift herself, rebuilding how she worked from the ground up using AI. Nick had spent years building brands at the highest level and had seen firsthand what happens when you take talented people and point them at new problems. At TikTok, instead of optimizing what already existed, he was asked to create entirely new revenue. The result was multiple billion-dollar lines of business that would not have existed if the company had only focused on doing the same thing with fewer people.
We kept coming back to the same conversation. AI is the most powerful tool we have seen in our careers. But the default response to it is fear. Cut headcount, cut cost, cut fast, and call it transformation.
We think that is the wrong move. And a shortsighted one.
When the cost of knowledge, execution, and coordination falls toward zero, the opportunity is not to do the same work with fewer people. It is to take the people who already understand your business and move them into work that was not possible before.
When IKEA brought AI into customer service, it could have let 8,500 people go. Instead it recognized what those people actually knew — more about IKEA's products than almost anyone alive — and retrained them as interior designers. A cost center became a new revenue line. That is not charity. That is strategy.
Most of what AI removes is what we call the coordination tax. The hidden work of staying in sync, chasing approvals, and moving information between people who would rather be doing the actual job. Reduce the tax and your best people get their creative energy back.
They show up as more of themselves, not less.
That is why we started Roster & Co. We believe the future of every company is a roster of humans and agents working together, both doing what they are best at. Every company's roster is actively changing. The question is whether you lead that change or get reorganized by it.
Redeploy before replace is our foundational commitment. Not a promise that no job ever changes. A sequence. Before you replace a person, ask a better question.
What is this person capable of that we have never had the room to use?
What we hold to
- 01
See it early
The signals that matter show up before the headlines do. We help you read them.
- 02
Move while it counts
Speed is the advantage. We help you decide and act before the window closes.
- 03
Keep your people
Adapt the company without abandoning the humans who built it.