Lots of people are talking about how LLMs might change how large organizations work.

I think LLMs will almost certainly have a big effect on how organizations work.

But I don't think it will be a panacea.

The "metagame" of corporate politics emerges inexorably.

It arises from every player trying to get an edge so they don't get knocked out of the game.

That, combined with the core asymmetry that everyone has to act like they think their boss is right.

The boss is the one formally empowered in a system to kick a report out of the company.

So it's imperative to make sure they are happy or you might be knocked out of the game.

The metagame arises inexorably from these.

If you change the substrate, the metagame doesn't go away; it just shifts and adapts to the new reality.

Perhaps in a way that isn't obvious to start, and thus is potentially more harmful.

Examples of how an LLM-based tool to give leadership status updates might lead to different on the ground strategies:

People will learn to say the words they've heard the CEO say, to be less likely to be flagged by the system as working on something unimportant.

People will learn that if they can get lots of people to say the same distinctive words, it's more likely to catch the attention of the CEO.

A kind of inception by toying with small structural levers.

"We don't have politics here" has never been true for any assemblage of human beings ever, and never will be.