AI and the ‘skinny hamburger, fat bun’ problem — why the future of work needs to look more like a pizza

George Leimer recognized it immediately.

On a recent call with the Yahoo Finance product chief, I pulled up a slide that looked like two burgers, side by side, to represent eras of work before and after AI. Leimer leaned in. “It’s totally that,” he said.

The slide came from Arvind Narayanan, a Princeton computer scientist who just keynoted the International Conference on Machine Learning in Seoul. In his illustration, the burger on the left, labeled “Traditional,” shows a thick patty — the execute layer of work, the coding and debugging — sitting between modest buns. On the right, labeled “With AI,” the patty has shrunk to a sliver. The buns — “decide” on top and “deliver” on the bottom — have swollen in size.

Work used to be a fat hamburger with skinny buns, as the meat of the work was the actual doing of the task. Now, AI is collapsing the middle of the sandwich, but the top and bottom layers of human work are growing instead of disappearing. Work is increasingly talking about work — there’s a lot of bun to chew over.

“We come in and talk to each other and we make sure that we really have real confirmation and conviction about, like, these are the things we’re going to do. And this is how we’re going to unleash the agents.”

Leimer’s team led the development of a new investing product, AlphaSpace, that has been live in the market for about two months, as Fortune was first to reveal. In that short window, the team has shipped over 100 new features, illustrating how the execute layer has accelerated. Users are spending 3x more time in AlphaSpace than the average Yahoo Finance user, Leimer told Fortune, and the team has been able to respond quickly to user feedback, like its recent addition of real-time options data, in a partnership with Unusual Whales.

Sprints that used to run two weeks now run 24 hours, Leimer said: planning in the morning, shipping by end of day, retrospective at night. In one case, feedback arrived at 4:45 p.m. on a Friday; by 8:30 the same evening it was fixed, reviewed, and live.

“In the old days,” Leimer added, “that would have been, ‘We can’t launch it next week.’”

The decide‑execute‑deliver sandwich

Narayanan calls his framework the “decide‑execute‑deliver sandwich.” Most knowledge work, he argues, has three layers: a decide layer on top, focused on understanding what needs to be built and why; an execute layer in the middle that represents the actual implementation; and a deliver layer on the bottom, covering integration, testing, and long‑term accountability.

AI agents are compressing the middle layer. But Narayanan’s point is that the execute slice was only ever about a third of the job. The buns, he says, are not just........

© Fortune