Season 5 - Episode 41: Who Counts as a Colleague?
AI is already helping many of us work faster.
It can process information, identify patterns, draft emails, summarise meetings and remove manual work from our day.
But that is no longer the most interesting question.
The bigger question is what happens when AI moves from helping us complete tasks to taking responsibility for them.
In this episode of Simply Briefed, Kristine Lium speaks with Max Thormé, founder of Talendary, about what changes when humans and AI agents begin working together inside organisations.
Together, they explore recruitment, talent, organisational design and the shift from using AI as a support tool to building teams where human colleagues and AI agents both become part of how work gets done.
Key topics in this episode
Why AI in recruitment is about more than processing applications faster
How organisations can understand skills, potential and business needs differently
Why the shift from assistance to delegation changes how teams are built
What happens when AI agents take responsibility for tasks and workflows
Why leaders may need to rethink roles instead of refilling old job descriptions
Where humans add the most value when more work can be delegated
Episode 41: Who Counts as a Colleague?
– Max Thormé, founder of Talendary
This week’s episode
The AI transition may be less about adding another tool to the organisation we already have, and more about building our own organisation 2.0. Human teams, agent teams and the combination between them.
For a long time, much of the conversation around AI at work has focused on productivity.
Can we write faster?
Can we process more information?
Can we remove repetitive tasks?
Those questions still matter.
But in this conversation, Max points to a bigger shift.
The real change may not happen when AI helps us become 20 percent more productive. It happens when we can delegate full tasks to agents and free human capacity for something else.
That changes the conversation from efficiency to organisational design.
From recruitment to capability
Talendary started from a recruitment problem.
Max wanted to help organisations match people based on potential rather than network, timing or traditional signals.
But the conversation quickly moves beyond recruitment.
Because once organisations can understand people, skills and business needs differently, the question becomes bigger than who to hire.
It becomes a question of how work should be organised.
Are we hiring for old job descriptions while the work itself is changing?
Are we still building teams around fixed roles, even when capabilities, tasks and business needs are becoming more dynamic?
And when someone leaves, should the answer always be to refill the same role?
Or is it an opportunity to rethink the team?
Delegation, not only assistance
One of the clearest shifts in the episode is the difference between AI assistance and AI delegation.
Assistance means AI helps us do what we already do, only faster.
Delegation means AI takes responsibility for a task, a workflow or part of the team’s output.
That is where the idea of the team starts to change.
Max describes how Talendary is building its own organisation around both human team members and AI agents. Not as a distant future scenario, but as part of how the company already works.
The question is no longer only: which tasks can AI help with?
It is also: which tasks should humans still spend their time on?
Human teams and agent teams
If agents can take responsibility for more work, the boundary around what we call a colleague starts to blur.
A colleague has traditionally been someone we work with.
But if an AI agent handles recurring tasks, supports decisions, follows up on information or contributes to the output of a team, where does that line sit?
Is a colleague defined by the work they do?
Or by the human relationship around the work?
That question gives the episode its title: Who counts as a colleague?
What should stay on our own lists?
The episode also returns to a practical question for anyone working in or leading an organisation:
What should stay on our own to-do lists?
If AI can take over more repetitive, administrative and task-based work, the goal is not simply to get more done.
The bigger opportunity may be to free more human capacity for judgement, creativity, problem-solving and the conversations that actually move the business forward.
That also creates a new responsibility for leaders.
Roles may need to be defined less by hours spent and more by outcomes delivered.
Teams may need to be built less around old structures and more around where people and agents can each create the most value.
Building organisation 2.0
The AI transition is often described as a tool rollout.
But this episode suggests it may be something larger.
It may be about redesigning the organisation itself.
Not only adding AI to existing workflows, but asking which workflows should exist, which tasks should be delegated and where human contribution becomes more important.
Because the real opportunity may not be to make the old organisation slightly more efficient.
It may be to build a new version of how we work.
Human teams.
Agent teams.
And the combination between them.
🎧 Listen now on Spotify!
Host: Kristine Lium
About the guest
Name: Max Thormé
Title: Founder of Talendary
Background: Max Thormé started programming at age 11 and has been trying to automate away everything in his life ever since. He's founder and CEO of Talendary, where hundreds of AI agents already work alongside the team every day, and the goal is to put those same superpowers in the hands of every HR and talent organization, turning them into what Talendary calls People Architects.
👉 Listen to the full episode of Simply Briefed to explore what happens when AI moves from helping us work faster to becoming part of how teams, roles and organisations are built.
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