At a time when AI is replacing skilled workers across organisations, there is a company called Atlan which is asking engineers to teach AI to do their work. The company, which is into metadata management, has asked its engineers to teach AI how to code to build an autonomous organisation. This approach is not just limited to engineering only. Other departments, including customer success, marketing, and sales, are in the early stage of making this shift.
In a LinkedIn post, Prukalpa Sankar, founder and co-CEO of the company, wrote, “Engineers at Atlan are not allowed to code anymore. That’s a ban. You’re only allowed to teach AI how to code.”
Prukalpa said that their marketing team has also been asked to stop running marketing campaigns and teach AI how to run a marketing campaign. “I’ve now issued the same rallying cry to our marketing team: by June, you can’t run a marketing campaign. You can only teach AI to run a marketing campaign,” she wrote.
Moving towards an autonomous organisation
Prukalpa says most companies are using AI to be more productive, but she believes there is a difference between using AI as a productivity tool—to be faster and more efficient—and building an autonomous organisation, where AI does most of the execution. She says that her company is taking a different approach, where AI is doing the execution and human workers are focused on thinking, teaching, and governance.
“There’s a difference between using AI as a tool for productivity and building toward an autonomous organization. Most companies are stuck on ‘use AI to be more productive.’ We’re asking a different question: what does every job look like when AI does the execution and humans do the thinking, teaching, and governance?” she wrote.
Engineering leads the shift
Prukalpa says engineering has moved to an autonomous mode in the past few months because coding AI tools are already strong, but she says other departments, including customer success, marketing, and sales, are in the early stage of the same shift.
“For engineering, that shift happened first because the tooling got there first. I think we are seeing first glimpses of autonomous organisations in engineering in the past few months,” she wrote.
‘Humans can become superhumans’
She believes humans are becoming superhumans by curating, structuring, and optimising information, and feeding it into AI to maximise output, accuracy, and relevance, while teaching AI what we do.
“I believe humans have a shot at becoming superhumans in this new world! How we get there? By context engineering and teaching AI to do everything we do. Then doing more. The things we’ve never done before. And more. And more,” she wrote.
