AI for your role
Ten kinds of office work. For each: the layers of the stack that matter most, what to do on them, where to start and what can go wrong.
Human Resources & People Operations
AI is taking over the first draft and the first answer in HR: job posts, candidate shortlists, policy questions and case notes. Decisions about people stay with people, and the law increasingly says so.
Key layers: Layer 9 · Applications & Interfaces, Layer 7 · Orchestration & Tooling, Layer 8 · Agents, Layer 4 · Data
Finance, Accounting & FP&A
AI now drafts reconciliations, variance notes and forecasts, and reads contracts and filings in bulk. Finance keeps its oldest rule: a number counts only if you can trace it and someone signs for it.
Key layers: Layer 9 · Applications & Interfaces, Layer 8 · Agents, Layer 7 · Orchestration & Tooling, Layer 5 · Foundation Models
Sales & Business Development
AI is absorbing the work around selling: account research, call notes, record updates and first-touch outreach. Sellers keep the conversation, the judgment and the relationship.
Key layers: Layer 9 · Applications & Interfaces, Layer 8 · Agents, Layer 7 · Orchestration & Tooling
Marketing, Brand & Communications
AI makes copy, images, video and voice in minutes, so volume is no longer the hard part. The hard parts are staying on brand, owning what you publish and saying when it was made by a machine.
Key layers: Layer 9 · Applications & Interfaces, Layer 5 · Foundation Models, Layer 7 · Orchestration & Tooling, Layer 4 · Data
Product Management & Design
AI changes product work twice. It speeds up your own craft, from research synthesis to working prototypes, and it becomes a material you design with, one that behaves differently every time.
Key layers: Layer 9 · Applications & Interfaces, Layer 8 · Agents, Layer 7 · Orchestration & Tooling, Layer 6 · Inference & Optimization
Engineering & Software
Software is the profession AI has changed most. Agents now read a codebase, edit many files, run the tests and open the pull request. The engineer's job tilts toward specifying, reviewing and owning the system around the model.
Key layers: Layer 8 · Agents, Layer 7 · Orchestration & Tooling, Layer 6 · Inference & Optimization, Layer 5 · Foundation Models, Layer 9 · Applications & Interfaces
Cybersecurity & Information Security
Security teams have two jobs with AI. One is using it: triage, investigation and hunting at machine speed. The other is securing it: every assistant and agent the company deploys is a new system that takes instructions from text.
Key layers: Layer 8 · Agents, Layer 7 · Orchestration & Tooling, Layer 9 · Applications & Interfaces, Layer 6 · Inference & Optimization
Legal, Compliance & Risk
AI reads and drafts faster than any associate: research memos, contract redlines, document review. It also invents authorities with total confidence, and courts have sanctioned lawyers for filing them. The duty to check has not moved.
Key layers: Layer 9 · Applications & Interfaces, Layer 7 · Orchestration & Tooling, Layer 6 · Inference & Optimization, Layer 4 · Data
Operations, Supply Chain & Project Management
Operations is process, and process is what agents are built for: take a request, check the rules, act across systems, report. AI moves from summarising work to doing steps of it, so the design question becomes which steps, and who handles exceptions.
Key layers: Layer 8 · Agents, Layer 9 · Applications & Interfaces, Layer 7 · Orchestration & Tooling, Layer 5 · Foundation Models
Customer Support, Success & Experience
Support is where AI agents are most established. They answer from your help content, take actions such as refunds within limits, and work in chat, email and voice. Human agents move to the hard cases, with AI drafting beside them.
Key layers: Layer 9 · Applications & Interfaces, Layer 8 · Agents, Layer 7 · Orchestration & Tooling, Layer 6 · Inference & Optimization