My idea for Braid started during COVID, when Philippa White from TIE introduced me to Debbie Ahenkorah. Debbie was leading African Bureau Stories in Ghana, an organization dedicated to bringing more African children’s stories into the world. I was working in advertising in New York at the time.
On paper, we came from very different worlds. Debbie brought deep experience in social impact, entrepreneurship, and building an organization around a mission. I brought experience in marketing and communications, helping organizations shape commercial ideas in ways that would persuade people to act.
What made our partnership work so well was that there wasn’t really a “marketing opportunity” and a “business opportunity.” There were simply important opportunities African Bureau Stories needed to hop on, and we brought whatever skills we had to achieve that.
I’d spent years applying marketing expertise to a fairly specific set of marketing opportunities. Working with Debbie gave that expertise a much broader canvas. How should African Bureau Stories explain its value to corporate partners? How could storytelling help the organization achieve its mission, rather than simply promote it?
Marketers often say they want to be closer to the business. But the organizations they work in don’t always make that easy. Working with Debbie did, partly because we were such a small team. There was no marketing department and no handoff between functions. We were simply trying to solve the problems that mattered most. My marketing skill hadn’t fundamentally changed, but the range of problems I could apply it to had.
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People have always been capable of contributing more than organizations allowed.
For decades, most organizations have been built around functional specialization. We group marketers with marketers, finance people with finance people, and operations people with operations people. That has created deep expertise and allowed people to get very good at particular things. But it has also restricted where that expertise tends to be applied.
A person might have extraordinary creativity or problem-solving ability, but the organization gives them a relatively narrow arena in which to use it. Their job title defines the problems they are expected to solve. Their team determines much of the knowledge and capability they can easily collaborate with. Meanwhile, their position in the hierarchy shapes the decisions they are trusted to make.
In that sense, organizations have long shaped where human capability is allowed to be applied. AI gives us an opportunity to loosen some of those restrictions, allowing people to bring their existing skills and expertise to a much wider range of situations.
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AI’s strength isn’t making everyone an expert in everything; deep expertise gained through actual experience is irreplaceable. What AI can change is the range of contexts in which people are able to apply the expertise they already have.
Take a marketer. Their craft might be understanding audiences or creating advertising campaigns. AI can now help them understand and work with operational plans, financial information, or customer data that once sat outside their world. They don’t suddenly become finance or operations experts. But they can bring operational and commercial realities more directly into how their marketing programs come to life, while also bringing their marketing expertise into a wider set of business problems.
This is why I find the current conversation about AI too narrow when it focuses mainly on efficiency and automation. Those things matter, but they miss the bigger opportunity.
AI can help people apply their skills and expertise to a much broader set of the organization’s problems, particularly the ones with the greatest business or mission impact.
During our recent conversation on the TIE Unearthed podcast, Debbie described this in a way I loved. Thinking back to everything she struggled to access while building African Bureau Stories, she said AI could become “their Cam” (I didn’t know whether to blush at the praise, or be afraid of how replaceable I now am with AI!)
She already had the ambition and understanding of what African Bureau Stories needed. What she didn’t always have was access to a marketing lens required to turn a visionary idea into a marketing program. AI can now help her bridge some of those gaps herself through Skills, Projects, and access to functional best practices. It doesn’t give Debbie her vision or her judgement; it gives her new ways to apply those strengths in a marketing context that previously required someone like me to step in.
Small organizations often work this way out of necessity. People stretch across boundaries because there simply aren’t enough people for every capability to live inside its own department. Larger organizations have a harder problem: they have to deliberately create that freedom without losing the depth of expertise that specialization gave them in the first place.
That is where organizational design becomes critical.
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Most organizations are still built around older assumptions about where expertise lives and what individual roles are supposed to do. AI might allow someone to take a piece of work much further than before, but if the organization still expects them to stay within the same narrow remit and hand the work off at the same point, very little has really changed.
The job of organizational design is to create the conditions in which people can bring more of their abilities to the problems that matter to the business.
Sometimes that will mean broadening a role. Sometimes it will mean moving a decision closer to the person doing the work or making specialist knowledge easier for other people to access. The specific answer will differ by organization, but the principle is simple: if people can now contribute more, the organization should be designed to allow that contribution.
That is the opportunity I see in AI, and it is the reason Braid exists.
Human capability was extraordinary before generative AI arrived. The technology doesn’t just add to that potential, it gives us new ways to apply it.
Listening back to my conversation with Debbie and Philippa, I realized this belief had been forming for years. Our work together showed me, in a small way, what can happen when expertise is freed from its usual boundaries and applied to the problems that matter most.
AI makes that possibility much more expansive and exciting. Now we need to design organizations that are ready for it.
