The organizational chart of the future may bear little resemblance to the one hanging on a company's wall today. Rather than showing who reports to whom, an AI-native org chart could map which employees and AI agents have access to which systems, who can spend from which budgets, and who gets consulted on which projects.

That is the vision MIT professor Paul Cheek is pitching to chief human resources officers (CHROs) as companies rapidly integrate AI into their workforces. Cheek argues that HR leaders have an opportunity to take ownership of how humans and AI agents are organized across the enterprise—and to make AI literacy a core part of that transformation.

A new study from Cheek's independent research organization, the AI-Driven Enterprise Institute, found that just over 30% of executives at S&P 500 companies are AI-literate. According to the study, that group is achieving 78% stronger AI execution than their peers. The remaining roughly 70% of executives form the comparison group in that finding—and the immediate audience for the training and upskilling Cheek says comes first.

Cheek says the first step for CHROs is investing in AI training and upskilling for executives and employees. The next, he says, is rethinking the org chart itself.

"The CHRO title itself needs to change from managing headcount to auditing whether a given role needs a human's judgment or an AI agent's uptime," Cheek says.

In Cheek's model, the org chart would become a dynamic, living document that changes as AI agents are added, retired, or even build their own agents. It would track access to everything from social media accounts to Salesforce, as well as spending authority and decision-making responsibilities. In that model, auditing who—and what—can act inside the company becomes the chart's core function, one that expands as agents add other agents to the roster.

Cheek acknowledges that he has not yet found a company that has implemented this kind of technologically advanced org chart. But he believes AI could help generate one—and he has built his own prototype using AI. For now, the idea exists only as a pitch and a prototype, which makes the first corporate adopter the milestone to watch.

Cheek's pitch to CHROs is three-fold: learn how AI works, teach those skills across the company, and rethink which work should be done by people and which should be done by AI. The CHROs who take on that job, he says, will "emerge from the woodwork as the most influential and the most important strategic leader in the organization."

This story, authored by Kristin Stoller, Editorial Director at Fortune Live Media, was originally featured on Fortune.com on Sept. 28, 2026. Source: Here's what the AI-native org chart could look like.