When the recent Bloomberg article “The $400,000 Chief of Staff Is the CEO’s Secret Weapon in the AI Age” was shared across my network, it sparked a lot of great discussion. For anyone in this role seeing the reporting and the compensation figures, it felt like validation.
Historically, the Chief of Staff role has often been misunderstood, perceived primarily as an admin. While the Bloomberg article highlighted the pay, it also went into how CoS roles are rapidly expanding beyond just the C-suite into other leadership layers, pointing out the specific skill sets that require the human element.
My role as a Functional Strategy Lead in HR is a great example of where we see this expansion in action. In large tech companies, you see many FSLs who are essentially operating as Chiefs of Staff outside of the C-suite – supporting VPs and leaders deeper in the organization.
At a time when widespread anxiety surrounds AI taking jobs, it was refreshing to see an article highlighting a role whose demand is actually expanding as a direct result of AI.
Two Categories of Work in the AI Era
The broader conversation about AI and the future of work usually falls into two distinct categories:
- Routine & Execution-Heavy Roles: Jobs comprised mostly of routine tasks where AI will handle nearly 100% of the workload, leaving a human merely “in the loop” to double-check the output.
- Strategy-Elevated Roles: Jobs where AI reduces administrative friction and routine burdens, speeding up daily tasks so humans are elevated to perform even higher-level strategic work.
The CoS/FSL is a clear example of this second category. As the Bloomberg piece rightly noted, while AI can reduce operational drag – core human capabilities like judgment, communication, and influencing others are tough (if not impossible) to automate.
AI doesn’t replace these roles; it eliminates lower-value tasks so employees can focus on more strategic work and have greater impact.
Navigating Cognitive Overload in the AI Era
While AI reduces operational drag, it also creates a new challenge across organizations: cognitive overload.
I found this recent study published in Harvard Business Review really interesting, and it put a name to what so many of us are already experiencing in real time. It articulated something I think a lot of us have been feeling, but couldn’t quite put our finger on until now.
It showed that heavy AI usage often leads to acute mental fatigue – what researchers describe as “AI brain fry.” The study noted that AI doesn’t simply reduce workloads; it expands our “sphere of accountability,” leaving people responsible for monitoring more outputs, digesting more information, and handling a much faster pace of work.
Far from speeding up every choice, this continuous oversight and context-switching creates mental fog, decision fatigue, and ironically slower decision-making. People are inundated with more data, proposals, and updates than any single person can comfortably digest.
This is precisely where strategic thinkers become essential.
Teams and leaders need a trusted partner to digest this firehose of information, filter out the noise, and translate a constant stream of updates into clear, actionable strategy. AI can generate information instantly, but it takes human strategy and human context to make sense of it all.
Systems Thinking Across Siloed Teams
Beyond judgment, persuasion, and communication, there is another critical human capability that AI cannot replicate: systems thinking.
In large companies, teams are naturally heads-down in their own silos, focused on their specific OKRs. While leaders theoretically should be spotting x-org connections, there is so much happening at once that it is nearly impossible for any single leader to track everything.
This is where a CoS/FSL steps in as a systems thinker.
In practice, it means stepping back to connect the dots across the organization. It’s asking the broader questions that heads-down teams don’t have the bandwidth to explore: How does a strategic pivot in one org affect cross-functional workflows? Where are parallel efforts or duplication of work accidentally happening? How do we align incentives across siloed teams? Did we clearly think through the broader organizational implications and gather enough cross-functional input before launching?
The Future of Work
While routine, execution-heavy roles will see significant automation, human-centric strategy roles are becoming even more critical. AI can speed up task execution, but it cannot build genuine trust across complex organizations or provide the systems perspective needed to navigate rapid change.
The rise of the Chief of Staff isn’t an anomaly in the AI era – it’s a clear preview of the future of work.
As AI fundamentally transforms the nature of work, the success of an organization will ultimately come down to the humans behind the AI, providing the strategy that technology cannot replicate.
All perspectives expressed here are entirely my own and do not represent my employer.
