Mark Zuckerberg is outsourcing his thinking to AI. It shows in his new ‘personal AI agent’ experiment

Julio M. Ottino is the Robert R. McCormick Institute Professor at Northwestern University and former dean of its McCormick School of Engineering. Brian Uzzi is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and co-director of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems.

Mark Zuckerberg has access to some of the most sophisticated artificial intelligence systems on the planet. He is also building a company around the idea that AI can dramatically reduce the need for human work.

A recent Reuters investigation offers a revealing glimpse of where that idea can lead. Meta’s Project OT envisioned an “AI-native” company in which AI agents would take over much of the work performed by thousands of employees. Teams could become dramatically smaller. Some layers of management could disappear. Zuckerberg himself has been using what Meta calls a “CEO agent,” allowing him to retrieve answers that previously required going through several layers of staff.

The attraction is obvious. Every organization contains friction. Meetings take time. Information gets lost between layers. There’s push back.  Decisions move slowly. AI can compress all of this.

Yet some friction serves a different purpose. It comes from people who disagree, see problems differently, remember inconvenient facts or ask questions that others would rather avoid.

That distinction matters enormously as AI moves from helping people perform tasks to helping leaders think.

We call these two forms of friction coordination friction and cognitive friction. Coordination friction comes from the mechanics of collective work: scheduling, documentation, data reconciliation, approvals and communication. AI can reduce much of this friction with........

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