A friend recently told me how he built a working app in one weekend. He’s not a programmer. He’s a CEO. All he did was open a no-code AI tool, sketch out what he wanted, and by Sunday evening he had a functioning MVP. Monday morning he showed it to his product team. Their jaws dropped.

This little story captures something much bigger: AI is tearing down the walls inside organizations. The neat separation between “the people who think,” “the people who sell and manage,” and “the people who build” is starting to blur.

The Old Picture of Organizations

Traditionally, you could map most companies in three layers:

* Leaders — the CEO and directors, setting direction and making strategic bets.

* Business developers — sales, marketing, operations, product management; they know the customers and translate strategy into action.

* Technical experts — developers, engineers, data analysts; they build the actual tools, products, and infrastructure.

This division of labor reflected scarcity: few people understood technology deeply enough to build things, so they became a separate class.

What AI Changes

AI dissolves these walls.

* Leaders now play. With tools like Lovable, Windsurf, or simply ChatGPT, a CEO can build a prototype in days, analyze raw data over a weekend, and enter Monday meetings not with abstract questions but with tangible mock-ups and sharper insights.

* Business developers now build. Product owners, marketers, or project managers no longer have to wait in line for analysts or engineers. With no-code AI and Vibe Coding, they can spin up internal tools, MVPs, or dashboards themselves. What used to take weeks can now take days. Their skillset shifts from “writing requirements” to “testing possibilities.”

* Technical experts now resist. Here’s the paradox: developers and engineers adopt AI too — GitHub Copilot, notebooks, copilots. Research confirms this: MIT Sloan’s study showed senior developers do benefit, but mostly for incremental coding tasks. They use AI like a spellchecker, not like a paradigm shift. Surveys (Houck et al., 2025) find the same: AI boosts routine work, but the higher the expertise, the more developers cling to their traditional stack. They insist on hand-checking infrastructure, doing their own security audits, writing code the “proper” way.

Yet AI can do much of this faster and more reliably. Security scanning is an AI-native problem: models can review every line of code, detect vulnerabilities, and explain them. Infrastructure setup? A few Windsurf prompts and you have a working environment. Business developers are already leapfrogging here with Vibe Coding. Senior engineers, meanwhile, argue about fit with existing architectures — but this often sounds like resistance, not progress.

The New Role of Engineers

The opportunity for technical experts is not to defend their old territory but to step up their game with AI. Let business developers handle the MVPs, the security prompts, the infrastructure scripts — and then check their work with AI at your side. Use your hard-earned brainpower to push beyond what was ever possible before:

* designing entirely new architectures,

* inventing new data flows,

* scaling AI-driven systems safely and ethically.

Engineers who cling to the old way risk being bypassed. Engineers who embrace AI as a multiplier can become the most valuable thinkers in the company.

Why This Matters Now

At AI Lab, where Alex van Ginneken and I guide companies through hands-on experiences with AI tools, we see this shift firsthand. Leaders discover they can prototype; business developers discover they can code; engineers discover they must either resist — or reinvent themselves.

And the research is clear: productivity gains are real (ANZ Bank, 2024). Less experienced users benefit most (MIT Sloan, 2023). Senior engineers often lag in adoption, partly by choice (Houck et al., 2025). The org chart is flattening, whether they like it or not.

Conclusion: A Massive Learning Curve Ahead

The org chart is being rewritten. AI has collapsed the distance between thinking, doing, and building. The CEO prototypes. The product manager codes. The engineer curates and secures.

For some, this is threatening. For others, it’s liberating. But it is inevitable.

The real question for every professional — leader, business developer, or engineer — is:

👉 Am I resisting the change, or using AI to do what I never thought possible?

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