Every so often, you come across a piece of writing that doesn’t just make you nod in agreement – it takes thoughts you’ve been circling for some time and gives them a clean, sharp frame.
That happened for me this week when I read a Linkedin post by Solon Angel. Solon not only crystallized the shift I’ve been seeing in work and leadership, but also gave me the language I have been searching for to carry the thoughts forward. His post introduced me to a stratification – “above and below the API” – that he attributed to Peter Reinhardt. It’s one of those deceptively simple lines that rearranges how you look at something you have been staring at.
The heart of it, as captured by John MacGaffey (also drawing on Peter Reinhardt) is this: In the evolving economy, you either tell the machines what to do or the machines tell you. That’s it. Those are the two sides. And increasingly, the dividing line between them is not a matter of job title or years of experience, but of how you engage with technology and decision-making.
We’ve seen this shift creep in quietly, often starting in industries where speed and scale dominate. As Solon mentioned, and John references in his blog post: two decades ago, a taxi driver relied on a human dispatcher. Today, an algorithm assigns the ride, maps the route, and decides the payout. There’s no middle manager mediating the relationship between the driver and the system. The driver takes instructions from software that never sleeps, never argues, and never adapts its reasoning for human context. That is not just a change in workflow – it’s a change in where control lives.
For those of us who think about leadership, this is not an abstract point. The structure of decision-making is the structure of power. When machines mediate those decisions, they also reframe the boundaries of influence. And that reframing is happening in more fields than we care to admit – logistics, finance, creative work, customer service, even elements of law and healthcare. The more software becomes the manager, the more people find themselves working under its logic instead of within a human-led structure.
Which leaves us with a choice.
We can resist the change, clinging to the ways we’ve always done things, hoping the tide will slow. Or we can treat this moment as a reset – a chance to rethink how value is created and shared, to question who gets to set the rules, and to design systems that keep human judgment, ethics, and creativity in the loop.
I like the way Solon framed the AI opportunity: stay “above the API.” In other words, position yourself on the side of the interface that shapes and instructs the system, rather than simply executing what it tells you. To do that, you need to map the processes you influence, choose the right tools deliberately, and orchestrate work so that you’re leveraging technology, not being leveraged by it.
This is not just about individual career strategy. It’s about leadership at every level. In organizations, those who understand the architecture of systems – not just the outputs – are the ones who can steer change instead of being swept along by it. In society, those who can navigate both human and machine decision-making will shape the rules for how we work, live, and connect.
We are no longer talking about a distant future. The shift is already here, and it’s accelerating. The real question is whether we treat it as a slow erosion of human agency or as an opening to build something better.
For me, reading Solon’s post was a reminder that we still have a window to choose. And while no single person can rewrite the rules of technology and power, each of us can decide whether to remain in the room where decisions are made – or settle for taking instructions from the other side of the screen.
And that is sobering, scary, and exciting at the same time!