How AI is Shifting Workplace Rewards from Packaging to Original Thinking
For a century, the modern workplace has consistently rewarded employees who could package their ideas into neat, structured, and timely outputs. According to Albert Santalo, founder and CEO of Archie.com and Archie Labs, this dynamic is undergoing a fundamental shift. With the rise of artificial intelligence, the mechanical tasks of structuring, summarizing, and formatting information are becoming automated, changing who succeeds in professional environments.
Historically, professional advancement favored individuals capable of converting thoughts into linear, scheduled, and correctly formatted documents. Santalo, who has spent decades building software companies, notes that the most original minds are often not the most organized. While linear thinkers easily navigated the "organization tax"—the time and effort required to sequence and polish insights—associative thinkers often struggled to get their ideas recognized, frequently receiving performance reviews criticizing their lack of organization or detail orientation.
The Impact of AI on Neurodivergent Professionals
This shift is particularly significant for individuals with fast, associative minds, such as those with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Entrepreneurship has long attracted these thinkers. A study by Michael Freeman, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, revealed that 29 percent of the entrepreneurs he evaluated reported having ADHD. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), approximately 6 percent of U.S. adults, or about 15.5 million people, currently have an ADHD diagnosis.
For these individuals, AI tools serve as translators that can assemble fragmented thoughts into coherent structures. Users can input disjointed notes or multi-directional ideas into an AI tool and receive a structured, cohesive output. This capability allows associative thinkers to bypass the traditional formatting obstacles that previously hindered their career progression.
Data supports this shift. During a three-month evaluation of Microsoft 365 Copilot conducted by the United Kingdom’s Department for Business and Trade among 1,000 employees, neurodivergent staff reported significantly higher satisfaction levels than their neurotypical colleagues. Neurodivergent employees were also more likely to recommend the tool, with one participant noting that the technology had leveled the playing field.
Closing the Execution Gap in Professional Services
The equalizing effect of AI extends beyond neurodiversity to general skill levels within organizations. A study led by Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson, alongside MIT’s Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond, examined more than 5,000 customer support agents utilizing a generative AI assistant. The researchers found that overall productivity increased by an average of 14 percent. Notably, the newest and least-skilled agents experienced a 34 percent productivity boost, whereas the performance of the most experienced agents showed minimal change.
Similarly, an experiment conducted by Harvard Business School and the Boston Consulting Group involving 758 consultants demonstrated a comparable trend. When using GPT-4, the bottom half of performers improved their output by 43 percent. This improvement was more than double the 17 percent gain recorded by the top half of performers.
These findings indicate that generative AI effectively compresses the execution gap—the differences in speed, polish, and formatting that historically separated lower and higher performers. However, the technology does not bridge the "judgment gap," which includes the quality of raw thinking, the taste to identify valuable ideas, and the critical judgment to evaluate assignments.
A New Era of Workplace Sorting
As AI commoditizes the process of organizing and formatting information, the value of pure execution is declining. Santalo suggests that professionals whose careers were built primarily on the clean formatting and polished delivery of ideas originated by others face significant automation risks. If a task's instructions can be processed by an AI tool to generate the same quality of output, the role is highly susceptible to automation.
Ultimately, the widespread adoption of AI means the workforce will no longer be sorted by how well individuals can organize their thoughts, but rather by whether their thoughts are worth organizing in the first place. This transition is expected to challenge those who relied on superior packaging while liberating original thinkers whose insights were previously obscured by organizational barriers.
