Godzilla Fish: AI's true disruption is not individual skills, but enterprise organizational structure

On February 27th, Shen Yu—co-founder and CEO of crypto custodian Cobo—stated in a social media post that for the past 200 years, the core of business management has essentially boiled down to one thing: turning people into cogs revolving around Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). With the rise of AI agents, he argued, trying to shoehorn AI into outdated processes to handle menial tasks is a recipe for failure. What AI truly disrupts is not skills, but organizational structure—not just how work gets done, but who does what and how teams operate. Larger enterprises face increasingly complex SOPs, as these documents are essentially “algorithms designed for human execution.” To avoid errors and liability, big firms keep patching SOPs, creating a rigid bureaucratic web. Forcing autonomous, planning-capable AI agents into this structure will only spark internal power struggles, he noted. The breakthrough? Ditch rigid SOPs and design workflows around AI agents instead. Restructure processes into “intent and guardrails”: humans set goals and boundaries, while agents autonomously optimize execution. Employee roles shift to that of “shepherds”—orchestrating rules, resolving exceptions, and making value judgments, rather than following step-by-step procedures. This will collapse departmental silos, enabling cross-team collaboration via millisecond-level API calls. Mid-level managerial roles, once focused on enforcing SOPs, will see their value plummet. The last wave of enterprise tech (ERP, OA, SaaS tools) focused on digitizing SOPs. The next generation of leading companies will build agent-first frameworks centered on “intent, dynamic workflows, and human fallback layers”—rewriting the 21st-century equivalent of Frederick Taylor’s *Principles of Scientific Management*. A real-world sign of this shift emerged recently: Block—Jack Dorsey’s Bitcoin payment company—announced layoffs of 4,000 employees (nearly half its workforce) as it bets on AI to transform future labor productivity.