Tour of Duty in the AI Era
We wrote about our concept of tours of duty a few years ago, and have been mulling over how to update it in the new world of AI-assisted productivty, and changes in hiring, retention, and consolidation of capital in a very few, large conglomerates.
We expect that the trend toward consolidation of resources in the hands of a few (think FANG, but with an AI spin) will continue. There will be long-tail careers available in large companies, but there will also be a huge market for talent grabbing. [thereâs a lot of evidence on this, from insane signing bonsues for AI talent, to layoffs of middle management. Note to self to gather these so itâs easy to see what weâve been reading].
That brings experience and excellence, but also the grind: client management, transcribing your vision into executable tasks, the boredom of work you used to delegate.
It also brings up some ideas about how creating AI agents to take the workload that is delegable and taking those agents as a part of your whole work package, could be a trend weâre headed toward.
Looking back the the original framework we had for how 30 year careers with a single company was being transformed, I can imagine thereâs a third path opening in the world of AI. First - a trip back to the framework we adapted.
The Original Framework (2019)
From our earlier work on tours of duty:
We started rolling out specific tours of duties a couple of years ago, and itâs really helped us define success for each arc of an employeeâs time with us. Employees are generally happy to sign up for a one or two-year intentional investment (still at will, of course) rather than an undefined purgatory of work. And it has helped me see my company as a place to not just do good work for our clients, but be a stepping stone for our team to help them succeed.
To kick off this experiment, we began defining success anecdotally. We realistically defined what we anticipated an employee could accomplish in 1â2 years that strengthened skills they were interested in exercising or built new skills they were interested in honing in their career.
That looked something like this:
Our business needs to [insert part of the business here], and you have [insert already-proven skills here] that we know will help. Youâre looking to [area of growth], and we believe [business area] will benefit from you growing those skills.
That framework was a major game-changer.
These smaller arcs helped us understand how to invest in the team member, and helped our team members understand why we needed that role filled by them.
Recently, weâve gotten clearer on the actual numbers behind that investment, and their impact on pieces of our business (revenue, speed to delivery, customer value, etc.). Weâre slowly starting to share this with our team, hoping it helps our team understand the risks and rewards weâre evaluating as we collectively invest in the tour of duty together.
Our take on tours of duty (2019 version):
- Define what someone could actually accomplish in 2 years (skills they bring to the table, skills theyâll work on, etc.)
- Then, once youâre clearer on the small things people can accomplish in 2 years, figure out how that translates to revenue.
- You can do 1 without 2, but if you do 1, at some point, 2 will become clear to you, and youâll want to share it with them.
Agents as Hiring Signal
random idea of the day -- what if when we hired again we asked people to bring their suite of agents that supports their work
omgg
because we can see how they breakdown and think about how to do their jobs
the only thing we actually care about - how do you think about the work
it's like bringing your whole team to a job in the olden days
"i'll come but only if you hire my secretary and also my direct report"
and now its' "ya but here's how i do my work, this is my little agent that writes weekly updates, and my little prd guy, and my little reminder to drink water agent"
What could a Tour of Duty look like? (2026 version):
- Define what zone of genius someone has demonstrated (agents who support them, wins on their resume, etc.)
- Understand the gaps in your competitive strategy, and whether that person plays a role in the team you need to win the next game.
[link to infinite games]
The Sports Model: A Third Path
Professional sports already work this way:
- Athletes are constantly traded between teams
- They bring specific, concentrated expertise
- Compensation is front-loaded into peak years (10 years of high earnings vs. 30 years of moderate earnings)
- The compressed earnings support career pivots when demand for their skills drops
You bring a set of skills that fit an organization in a specific state, get paid well to âwin gamesâ together, then reinvest to retrain for the next org. You move from player, to coach, to owner. Both parties benefit from the trade when your skills and their needs overlap.
part of what's hard is that as a contractor you're hired on value / outcomes, but not on inputs. as a w2, you're hired on "potential for impact". but there's all these experts now in this world (and there will be more) who can't provide 30 year value to a company, but their potential is super high, so they miss both the w2 and the 1099 train. one of the trends we've seen is hard it is to operate outside the big 100 companies, and we've been thinking about how we can play a role in the disaggregation of that economic accumulation. <
and Peter said, extremely interestinly, that sports actually works like that now
PGA expertise coming to play!
so you are constantly traded between [companies] and you bring [WR expertise] and you get extreme compensation over a 3-10 year period. the old model has us thinking about careers as less money per year over a 30 year period, nstead of a lot of money in a 10 year period that supports the other 20 years.
but the interesting part / overlap is if you could convince people to be "traded" that way we could kind of open up a third path, and if you could convince companies to offer ways to compensate people for what they bring culturally to the position (the ted lasso's) or skill wise (the mahomes), then you could kind of restructure the working economy
like if instead of working on a specific client for a fraction of our time, we are actually employed there for 6 months, we make a lot of money during that period because they have a lot of wins, and then we're off for 6 months to retrain for the next client.
consulting+ but instead of a deck and a recommendation to fire everyone, we actually build something during that time
exactly, I could go to a startup and say "you need someone who's built a product process three times, has zero interest in working here long term because they have no interest in working for a large org, and will be traded to another team as soon as you both win this Super Bowl.