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From the beginning, I knew that in Zero Human Company I wanted to take execution out of human hands. It is the most obvious part of the experiment, and it is exactly where AI is making the fastest progress today. But the longer I design this company, the more clearly I see that automating execution alone is not enough.
Execution can be handed to the system. Being the person without whom nothing moves can remain. That is the trap I am trying to avoid.
AI can prepare an analysis, answer a customer, or carry out the next step in a process. And yet someone may still be needed to pass along context, decide where something should go, and trigger the next step.
There is less human execution. There can still be plenty of glue.
In the previous piece, I divided the work people do in a company into four types: glue, execution, judgment, and expertise. The first two matter especially for ZHC. Execution is simply much easier to see. An executor produces something: a document, a reply, an analysis, an invoice, a configuration, or part of a product. Glue is less visible. It exists because two parts of the company cannot connect on their own.
This is real work. But I increasingly think of it as a tax on the way we designed the company.
What glue looks like
Glue does not come in one form. I have started noticing several forms that repeat across very different parts of a company.
Handoff. Someone moves information from one place to another. A customer tells sales something, and sales passes it to product.
Status. Someone checks whether what was supposed to happen has actually happened. Is development done yet? Has the customer sent the data?
Translation. The information exists, but not in a form the next part of the company can use. Someone interprets it, structures it, or translates it into the language or format needed somewhere else.
Context. Someone knows something that is not in the system. They know why we made a certain decision three months ago, or that we promised this particular customer an exception.
Routing. Someone knows where an issue should go next. They do not solve it. They simply know who should get it.
Reconciliation. Two places show slightly different versions of reality, and a human is needed to determine what is actually true.
In practice, these forms often overlap. Status checking quickly turns into sequencing: one part of the company has to finish first, then someone has to tell another part so the next step can begin.
Each of these actions can be small. The problem is that a company can be made up of thousands of such connections that never appear on an org chart. Nobody hires a Head of Remembering What We Agreed or a VP of Asking Everyone If They’re Done. And yet someone does this work every day.
How to find glue
There are a few sentences I am starting to treat as a simple detector.
“Ask Kate, she knows.”
“Let me know when you’re done.”
“Copy that into the CRM as well.”
“Hold off on this until I’m back.”
An even more interesting test is:
What stops working if a specific person disappears for two weeks?
Not because they are the only person capable of doing difficult work, but because they are the only person who knows what is happening, what is missing, and what should happen next. That is probably where we have found glue.
Glue flows upward
In a small company, there is one person who is naturally connected to more things than anyone else. The founder. They know the customers, the product, the history, and the priorities. Often, they are the only person who can see several parts of the company at once. That is why all the seams the organization never properly designed tend to flow toward them.
You can build a small company, replace a large share of execution with AI, and still create a terrible job for yourself. The founder launches one agent, passes its output to another, adds context for a third, checks the result, decides what should happen next, and remembers the state of the whole thing.
There are fewer people. There is less human execution. But the glue has not disappeared. It has been concentrated in one person.
When I wrote the first piece in this series, “I Don’t Want to Be a CEO Again,” I was mainly thinking about the classic founder role drowning in operations. I see it a little more precisely now. Maybe a large part of what I do not want to do again is become the central glue in my own company.
Sometimes we create our own glue
Not every seam comes from an imperfect system. A founder can create one too. The company is capable of taking the next step, but:
“Show me before you send it.”
“I want to approve every discount.”
“Everything should go through me.”
Then the human becomes glue not because the system cannot continue without them. The system simply has not been allowed to continue. And this is where I increasingly separate two things: control and participation.
I can control a system without participating in every operation. I can define boundaries, limits, and situations that require escalation, then intervene when an exception appears. I do not have to be part of every transition to remain in control of the whole.
Recognizing glue is one thing. Removing it is another.
I now know where it hides and why it so easily ends up on the founder.
In the next piece, I will move from diagnosis to design.
What works, what breaks, and where humans still matter in AI-native company design.
Indeed, you can become the glue for your AI agents. :) I see two ways out: one agent owns all the context, which feels like overkill, or specialized agents can talk to each other. Mine need a normal channel where they can ask each other for an update or more context, instead of using me for every handoff. Then they can become the glue for each other.