Will ROWE culture rise with AI?

The Results Only Work Environment was an experiment first tried in 2003 at Best Buy. The aim was to give staff complete autonomy, and their responsibilities were tied directly to outcomes. This means no schedules or even a specific region to work in. Leaders focus on outcomes and delivery, and not on the individuals themselves.

With AI becoming more capable and work transitioning to checking the AI outcomes at predetermined gates this could bring this work paradigm back into focus.

We are effectively treating AI in a ROWE environment — we don’t mind where or how the AI gets the results as long as the output it comes back with meets the specification and can be integrated.

This culture we treat AI with could start to permeate to entire organisations as the default way to work. Why have two different operating modes — one for staff and one for AI when you can share the same results driven architecture across the entire work lifecycle?

Summary

• ROWE has been around for a long time
• The rise of AI might bring it back into focus
• We already treat the AI with ROWE so why not the whole organisation?

Neon Coach — Business coaching for technology startups and scaleups

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