Org charts tell you who’s in charge of whom and what. They say nothing about how anything gets done: the workflows, handoffs, decisions, and systems that turn raw effort into outcomes.
That used to be an acceptable blind spot because work mostly moved through the boxes on the chart, one person and one department at a time. But AI agents don't work that way. They cut horizontally across teams, systems, and data, ignoring the vertical lines that org charts were built to enforce.
Work charts map work to the outcomes it's supposed to produce. That means leaders can finally see where things break and where to intervene. Work charts show how value is created, including:
- The outcomes the business is trying to produce
- The workflows that deliver those outcomes
- The people, systems, AI agents, decisions, handoffs, guardrails, and metrics involved along the way
“A work chart is a living, end-to-end map of how outcomes are produced,” explains Brian Solis, vice president and global head of innovation at ServiceNow.
The concept isn’t entirely new, but it’s taken on greater urgency as AI shifts from assisting workers to acting on its own across teams.
“AI makes this necessary because agents don’t operate neatly inside departmental boxes, which are vertical by design,” Solis says. “They work across systems, teams, data, and decisions horizontally. Once AI moves from assistance to action, leaders need a new way to see, govern, and improve how work flows.”
Despite the urgency, most organizations haven’t yet retooled their businesses in this way. That’s a key reason why only 5% of organizations have seen sustained profit-and-loss impact from their AI investments, according to Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
“AI initiatives fail not because of technology, but because leaders apply weak transformation discipline,” Matthieu Berthion, BCG managing director and partner wrote in the report.
Once you build a work chart, it shows how things are supposed to work and how they actually do. The latter is the more useful picture by far.
Leaders “discover the ‘coordination tax’ that everyone feels but no one owns,” Solis says, including:
- Duplicated work
- Unclear decision rights
- Hidden approvals
- Disparate and disconnected systems
- Swivel-chair processes
- Data trapped in silos
- Handoffs that erode time to value
A work chart also reveals where accountability breaks down: The moments that nobody owns become riskier when an AI agent, not a person, is executing a task. A work chart shows how much of the business runs on what Solis calls “invisible labor,” the tribal knowledge and undocumented workarounds holding a process together.
“This visibility can be uncomfortable, but it’s also the beginning of reinvention,” he says.
A work chart, by definition, doesn't belong to any single department. It cuts across all the same organizational boundaries that AI agents do, so no leader has natural authority to build or maintain one. Give the task to IT, and it becomes a systems map. Give it to HR, and it becomes an org-design exercise. You get the idea.
The data backs this up. McKinsey research found that organizations that assign clear ownership for responsible AI have the highest average AI trust maturity levels: 2.6 out of 4. Those without clear accountability lag at 1.8.
BCG research points to the same conclusion: Dedicated ownership matters. Organizations are 21% more likely to see sustained performance improvements when a chief transformation officer has “sufficient authority to lead the transformation, challenge the status quo, and mobilize the workforce.”
Solis’ new book, Infinite, co-authored by ServiceNow Chief Innovation Officer Dave Wright, makes the case for a chief workforce officer. The point, Solis reasons, is not a title for its own sake, but as recognition that the chorography of value creation needs an executive owner accountable for how work is designed, not just who’s assigned to it.
“Ownership has to sit above any one function,” Solis says. “There has to be an executive mandate, someone accountable for end-to-end flow working closely with the CIO, CHRO, CFO, CAIO, and business owners. Without understanding how work flows first, you risk accelerating yesterday’s dysfunction. The greatest risk is mistaking automation for reinvention and turning yesterday’s inefficiencies into tomorrow’s operating model.”
Deloitte found that 84% of enterprises haven’t redesigned jobs or the nature of work itself around AI capabilities.
McKinsey says that most organizations use AI to “accelerate work without eliminating the organizational constraints that limit performance.” The firm found “that only 21% of companies had fundamentally redesigned their operating models around AI.”
This demonstrates that the hurdle isn't technological but operational. Enterprises are experiencing a massive chasm between experimentation—which is cheap, easy, and relatively risk-free—and workflow orchestration, which requires deep structural change, governance, and role redesign.
“It’s hard because workflow redesign challenges power, incentives, habits, systems, and identity,” Solis says. “Most companies are organized to protect functions, not reinvent flows. They also tend to start with AI tools instead of asking what outcome should be different.” He suggests:
- Start small but seriously, choosing just a few specific, important workflows, such as: Lead to cash Incident to resolution Onboarding to productivity to outcome.
- Be honest with yourself about your current state. Identify every messy or unnecessary handoff, approval, system, delay, and workaround.
- Redesign your desired future state with humans and AI agents working together as one. Define what must stay human, what can become autonomous under policy, what should never be autonomous, and how success will be measured.
“The point is to make work visible so leaders can redesign it for the AI era,” Solis says.
None of this requires an enterprisewide reorg. It requires understanding how work moves. That's the shift a work chart forces.
“Shifting focus from an org chart to a work chart, even if it’s one workflow at a time, is transformation,” Solis says. “Ultimately, a work chart is about designing the company around how value should flow, not how authority has historically been arranged.”
Find out how ServiceNow can help you redesign your workflows for increased visibility.
