The In/Out Economy

The default knowledge job may soon be less about producing things and more about receiving, interpreting, deciding and sending.

I call it In/Out work.

The name is not particularly elegant, but neither is spending six hours moving between Slack, email, calls, documents and an agent that has just created seventeen new files without mentioning where they are. In/Out work starts when information arrives and ends when useful information leaves.

Between the two, someone has to understand the context, remove noise, make a decision, adapt the message to its recipient and close the loop.

This used to be called management

Senior managers have worked this way for decades. They receive financial results, customer feedback, internal tensions, market signals and recommendations. They rarely produce the underlying artifacts themselves. They transform information into priorities, decisions and instructions.

AI extends that operating model to a much larger part of the workforce.

• A designer may direct a visual model instead of producing every asset.
• A developer may supervise implementation agents instead of writing every function.
• A marketer may review research, positioning and campaign variants produced by several systems.

The work remains real. Its location changes.

The artifact is no longer the whole output

It is tempting to say that people doing In/Out work produce nothing. That is only true when they are bad at it.

Good In/Out work produces clarity, sequence, accountability and momentum. It reduces the amount of organisational energy required to move from information to action. Bad In/Out work produces information ping-pong.

The distinction matters because AI is likely to increase the amount of material circulating inside organisations. More reports. More options. More analyses. More drafts. More perfectly formatted reasons to postpone a decision. Producing information becomes cheap. Closing loops does not.

The new divide

The important distinction may no longer be between managers and individual contributors. It may be between people who can transform information into action and people who merely route it. Both can appear busy. Only one creates movement.

The future of white-collar work might look less like a factory and more like a very expensive switchboard.