AI as Coordination-Compressing Capital: Task Reallocation, Organizational Redesign, and the Regime Fork

Abstract

Task-based models of AI hold organizational structure fixed. We model AI as agent capital that compresses managers' per-link coordination costs toward residual floors for consequential decisions. Positive floors bound spans of control; zero floors do not. For a fixed manager pool, proportional team sizes, equal mean team quality and fixed within-firm pay shares, and when every floor is positive, the floors determine long-run managerial wage dispersion, independent of execution-compression parameters. With a common positive floor, distinct skills and skill-biased execution savings, managerial inequality is purely transitional: zero at zero capital and in the long run, positive at every positive finite capital level. If every lower-floor manager approaches capacity faster than every higher-floor one, inequality exceeds its long-run level at sufficiently large finite capital and converges from above, a non-monotone path. Numerical illustrations, not estimates, include a simulation with skill-sorted workers, to which the wage and Gini results do not apply.

arXiv comment33 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables. v4 (major revision): adds a residual per-link coordination floor that nests v3 at zero floors. Positive floors bound spans of control. When every floor is positive, and for a fixed manager pool with proportional team sizes, equal mean team quality and fixed within-firm pay shares, the floors set long-run managerial wage dispersion