The AI-native team
Output has multiplied. Checking hasn't. Your best people are stuck doing the wrong jobs.
Three gaps
Directors are drowning.
AI has made output several times faster than a year ago. Reports, briefs, analyses, models: all arrive quicker. Directors are now reviewing more drafts than they can judge properly. The bottleneck isn't production. It's the queue of work waiting for a senior person to look at it.
Implication: Take audit responsibility off them. Make sure work is checked before it reaches their desk. And you need more Directors per AI-using team than you did before, not fewer. (See The Director, below.)
The AI frontier is a full-time job.
More than ever, staying at the frontier requires focus. The people doing the best AI work spend all day on it. They rebuild workflows every quarter and know which model fits which task. We should expect everyone to use AI. We can't expect most people to keep up with the frontier. Senior and client-facing staff are worth more on judgement and relationships. The frontier belongs to a specialist.
Implication: Create a dedicated AI Builder role. Stop asking Directors to stay current on the tools and stop spreading frontier fluency thinly across the whole team. (See The AI Builder, below.)
The checking is broken.
Four failure modes, all common. Senior staff burning expensive hours on verification that sits below their pay grade. AI Builders pulled off the frontier to re-check their own output. Staff who look diligent but skim rather than check, passing errors through. Or worst: nobody checks at all. The work ships because the AI Builder is confident and the Director is busy. Assurance has been treated as a side-task. It's a craft.
Implication: Make auditing a specialised role, not a side-task bolted onto someone's existing job. The Auditor doesn't stop the work. They let it ship. (See The Auditor, below.)
Two scenarios
No accountability for any of the three jobs.
The difference is who specialises in what.
The three roles
The Director
Frames the problem. Decides what good looks like. Edits the work to make it great. Owns the outcome. Uses AI every day and gets real value from it.
Who becomes this? Your existing senior leader. No change in seniority, new mandate.
The AI Builder
Lives in AI all day, every day. The one seat where staying at the frontier is the job. Knows which model to use for which task, runs sessions in parallel, ships at pace. Practises it as a craft because the tools change every quarter. Wants to be minimally distracted by anything else.
Who becomes this? Defined by appetite, not rank. Could be a mid-career specialist or a sharp junior.
The Auditor
A different breed. The Director asks 'is this the best version of this?' The Auditor asks 'is any of this wrong?' Same draft, different question, different person. Traces citations to source. Runs key numbers independently. Replaces weak sources, swaps assumptions, reruns with corrected inputs, refines paragraphs that are nearly right. Auditing and fixing, not just checking. Uses AI every day and uses it well. The skill is judgement and accountability, not model selection.
Who becomes this? An experienced generalist with a nose for nonsense. Not necessarily someone who has done the underlying work themselves.
The word carries twenty years of the wrong connotations. The old auditor checked your work. A brake. A second-guess. The new auditor checks and improves the machine's work, on your behalf. Not the person standing between you and shipping. The person who lets you ship at all.
The handoff matters. The AI Builder ships fast and rough. The Director makes it great. The Auditor confirms it's right. If any one of the three tries to do another's job, the model breaks.
Build your team
Start with one AI Builder. They're the engine. The question is how many Directors can they serve, and how many Auditors does their output need. Without the Auditor seat, you ship the slow version, because you can't trust the fast one enough to send it.
The underlying logic: when AI agents make execution free, verification becomes the expensive thing. Ajey Gore named this for software engineering. Martin Fowler amplified it. The same economics apply to knowledge work. The ratio can run steep: a tool like Aleera can draft a full due-diligence pack in under an hour. Checking it properly might take a week.
Client briefs, project scoping, strategic calls. The moments where someone frames what good looks like and signs off at the end.
Reports, analyses, dashboards, research briefs, models, websites. Substantial pieces of work, not emails.
Tracing citations to source, rerunning key numbers independently, stress-testing the argument in a second model. Not skimming. Checking.
Most organisations have zero Auditors.
Software engineering has started reorganising around these three roles with the weight on auditing.
Knowledge work has not done the thinking here yet.
From David's Saturday AI Thoughts, Edition 10: Rise of the auditors