Dan Sirk is what is called a fractional executive. So he works as the chief marketing officer for not just one company, but two. at the same time.
This is a juggling act that becomes much more manageable with artificial intelligence tools like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT.
It used to take Sirk three to six months, or more, to work with a team of contractors to build a custom website. Now, it took me about a month and I can do it myself. Drafting a messaging strategy used to take a week. When I spoke to him in March, he had completed the job in less than eight hours. Thanks in part to these efficiency gains, Sirk will become the company’s third chief marketing officer in the coming months.
Still, when I asked whether we should assume, extrapolating from recent trends, that he would add more companies to his roster in the coming years, he looked at me like I was crazy. He claimed that even with the help of AI, there are three limits to what he can handle.
“There’s still a relationship,” he protested. To be more frank, I have a meeting.
Sark estimates he already attends 10 weekly meetings at both companies. There are regular one-on-one meetings with each CEO, as well as standing meetings with each of the CEO’s teams. There is a meeting with his own direct reports and with a company’s sales manager. There are also meetings about specific projects, such as a company’s upcoming presentation to investors.
Joining a third company can increase your meeting volume by 50%. Mr. Sark said that if he were to hire even one more chief marketing officer, he would be in meetings almost literally throughout the work week.
Sirk’s experience, while perhaps extreme, reflects the broader impact of AI in the workplace. AI is significantly accelerating and even completely replacing many of the tasks performed by white-collar workers. What cannot be automated, at least not yet, are the hard-coded requirements of bureaucracy.
With the help of AI, white-collar workers can now generate far more notes and strategy options and churn out more product prototypes and software features than ever before. But some executives still need to decide which options to greenlight. Employees can come up with more pitches, but they still have to convince customers to sign on the dotted line.
As AI makes the work of knowledge production increasingly efficient, the work of presenting, debating, lobbying, arm-twisting, reassuring, or simply selling results appears to be growing in importance. And the need for sometimes tedious human tasks may limit the number of people who can be replaced by AI.
“These have always been important skills,” said economist David Deming, dean of Harvard University. “But as the information environment becomes more saturated, the ability to tell stories from it – the ability to take large amounts of text and turn it into what people want – becomes increasingly valuable.”
Can you convince your colleagues?
The idea that automation increases the importance of personal interactions is not entirely new. A 2017 paper by Deming found that as computers become more powerful, the parts of jobs that require a lot of social interaction are increasing, while the parts of jobs that require a lot of math know-how but little social interaction, such as certain engineering roles, are shrinking.
Deming observed that by automating technical tasks, computers are effectively pushing people into jobs that emphasize social skills. That doesn’t mean emotionally resourceful people are the most successful by default, but those who are most successful tended to combine social skills with substantive knowledge. But what employers value has been rearranged.
Workers in a variety of white-collar occupations said in interviews that AI has reinforced this pattern. Many declined to be named for fear of backlash from their employers.
A data scientist at a software company said he and his colleagues had to write code for every new feature or improvement they wanted to evaluate. Now they just have to come up with an idea and AI writes the code and performs the analysis.
He said the company’s interview process, which used to be dominated by coding questions and rewarded socially awkward nerds, is now focused on whether candidates can come up with a good idea and convince co-workers to support it.
Mark Ozaki, a director at KPMG, said the firm has traditionally encouraged junior consultants to specialize in subject areas such as tax law and regulation or technical areas such as coding. But AI devalues this expertise and puts more emphasis on generalists who are good at taking the initiative and building relationships with customers, he said.
Ozaki, who oversees a team developing an AI-based sustainability platform called Sustainlit.com, said his team has sometimes been at the mercy of skilled programmers in the past. But now we can primarily use AI for coding, he said, and it primarily requires “someone who has a cell phone glued to their head and is everyone’s best friend and is proactive.”
Goodbye, programmers. Hello Customer Success
Corey Crosland, CEO of Policyfly, which sells software that helps insurance companies issue insurance policies, said AI has reduced both the time it takes to set up software for new customers and the number of employees needed to do it.
The move allows the company to significantly reduce upfront fees and appears to be increasing demand for its services. To keep up, PolicyFly’s headcount has grown from 20 to 28 in the past six months, but only two of the new hires are software engineers. Some of these are young employees who help customers with setup and work in customer success to help them get the most out of the software.
Still, Crosland said he doesn’t think the process can be automated any further, at least in the foreseeable future. reason? His customers want human interaction.
Customers want PolicyFly to reassure them that the software will work in a variety of situations, set up billing appropriately, or prorate policies in a way that makes sense.
And of course there are meetings to discuss everything, and there are many, many meetings. “If you’re a large company, you have multiple stakeholders from different departments involved,” Crosland said. “It’s even harder to get agreement and coordination on things.” – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article was originally published in The New York Times.
