The AI-Native Organization

The dominant AI narrative in leadership circles: automate tasks, cut headcount, and reduce cost is not just wrong, it's strategically dangerous. The organizations that will lead in research and innovation are those designing around human-AI partnership, where cross-functional teams replace traditional silos and a core organizational skill becomes intent engineering: understanding what the organization needs and expressing it precisely enough for AI systems to deliver. 

Drawing on Clinical Research Data Sharing Alliance (CRDSA) hands-on experience building an agentic AI platform for scalable clinical data harmonization, this keynote presents a working model for AI-native organizational design. The presentation will discuss how cross-functional teams, not traditional IT, product, or research silos, become the operational unit of the future. It argues that intent engineering paradoxically produces better human-to-human communication, more stable organizations, and a decisive shift from "how many roles can AI replace?" to "how does human-AI partnership empower teams to add dramatically more value?