Artificial intelligence is not just a tool. For Tomas Barazza, founder of «wethod», it is the drive to reinvent organizational structures and models that are too often taken for granted
The debate on artificial intelligence linked to the professional world too often focuses on a single question: how many jobs will disappear? It’s a legitimate question, of course, but perhaps not the most pressing one. Tomas Barazzafounder of «wethod», a technology company that develops integrated management for creative agencies, consultancy firms and project-based organizations, shifts the point of view: what if AI forced us to question the very way we built our companies?
Roles, processes, hierarchies, measurement systems: everything that appears natural in organizations today is actually the result of design choices made in a different era, to respond to the specific needs of that era. Artifacts, he calls them Barazza. But AI is not a tool that grafts onto these artifacts: it is rather the force that puts pressure on them.
The problem of those who start from a status quo
Anyone who already leads an agency or consultancy today and is trying to understand how to adapt to AI finds themselves in a particularly awkward position. It has a structure to defend, a margin to preserve, a workforce that responds to consolidated working models. The resulting reasoning, therefore, even when it seems strategic, is actually driven by a self-defense mechanism.
Barazza he states it bluntly: “Very often your reasoning is not completely honest.” In fact, those who start from a status quo tend to arrive at conclusions that protect their own position, and not necessarily the most rational ones (more correct, one might say) with respect to the market.
The exercise he proposes is different, therefore, and much more radical: forgetting what you have and asking yourself how you would design everything from scratch. A company with 1,000 employees that sells professional services, faced with artificial intelligence, does not ask itself how to become more competitive: it instead asks itself what to do with the entire structure if revenues are halved. Anyone starting from scratch, on the other hand, would not have that structure to defend, and could build something much more agile and profitable.
It is the almost paradoxical logic of the new entrant: those who do not have one legacy it can move without the same resistance. And those who cannot make this leap of perspective are warned Barazza“deludes that they can manage the problem” and risks finding themselves in great difficulty within three or five years.
The transformation of artificial intelligence
Understanding how AI will transform professional services requires a distinction that is often missing from public debate. Barazza articulates it clearly: there are services in which the output is everything, and services in which the process is part of the value.
If a client, for example, commissions an advertising campaign, what matters is the final idea. How long the agency took is completely irrelevant: the most effective campaign wins, period. In this type of work, AI can enormously reduce production times and costs, and the value would shift entirely to the quality of judgment: knowing how to choose what is good, what works, what is really worth it.
However, when a client needs guidance on an organizational transformation journey, the situation is very different. In this case, the service is the process itself: making a group of people evolve, changing their behaviors, modifying their habits. No technology (fortunately) can replace this function beyond a certain limit.
The trajectory of the industry, second Barazzaleads to a scenario in which most tools will be accessible to everyone. Agencies large and small will essentially work with the same core technology. In this context, the only levers of differentiation will remain two: the ability to make judgment and the ability to orchestrate the available tools well. To which is added the trust that can be built with the customer.
Fixed structures as obstacles in a dynamic world
If the end point is a more agile organization, the problem is that that transformation often requires giving up power. And this is precisely where change stalls.
Barazza identifies the role of leadership as the main brake on the technological revolution. In many organizations, those who say they want to be more agile are not really willing to reduce governance, distribute autonomy, loosen controls. Yet these are exactly the necessary steps. Hierarchies, organizational charts, complex structural levels: all these elements, created to manage the complexity of large organizations, risk becoming competitive disadvantages in a context in which scale is no longer a guarantee of quality.
Indeed, for those who work on intangible assets such as knowledge, creativity or consultancy, being big could soon incredibly turn into a handicap. Small companies will instead be able to achieve very high-level results with structural costs incomparable to those of large players. What was previously inaccessible to a small operator, due to lack of resources or technologies, would finally become reachable. And those who don’t have expensive structures to defend would also be able to marginalize better.
How to handle artificial intelligence
The practical answer of Barazza It might seem very simple, but it’s particularly complicated to execute: eliminate everything that AI can do as well or better. Processes, superstructure, bureaucracy. Lighten the hierarchy. Redistribute autonomy.
It’s not about firing people en masse, he points out. AI probably won’t reduce the overall work, but it will fragment it. It will go in the opposite direction compared to the consolidation that has characterized previous decades: less concentration, more fragmentation, more niche operators capable of competing with standards that were previously the prerogative of only the large ones.
Those who survive, in this new context, will not necessarily be those with more resources, but those who have been able to build a distinctive identity, a recognizable judgement, a capacity for orchestration that others do not have. And who will have had the courage to dismantle their own structures before the market did it for them.
