Developer VORM replaces operational director with Artificial Intelligence

Developer VORM is replacing its COO with Artificial Intelligence. Current operations director Michiel de Vries would make his position available as of March 31, 2030. So writes Pim van Meer, director of digitalization at VORM, in this episode of Pims digital maze.

De Vries is not leaving because things are going wrong or because the shareholder feels panic. Nor because man has officially resigned, but because, according to well-informed sources and his own advance humor, he himself is said to have suggested he start. "Leadership is leading by example."

In a conversation I had with him, Michiel said more or less what you hope a director will dare to say at some point: if you have been shouting for years that digitization is important, that data must be better utilized and that artificial intelligence is going to help us steer faster and better, then you can hardly continue to pretend that this is mainly something for other people. Then you also have to put your own function under the magnifying glass. Or, to put it somewhat more flatly: if you think the world is changing, you shouldn't be surprised if that change one day starts sawing away at your own desk chair.

His reasoning was actually stunningly simple. Much of an operations director's work involves gathering information, reading documents, making connections, spotting risks, preparing choices and organizing that the right issues are on the table at the right time. Important work, no doubt. But also work that by now you can no longer maintain with dry eyes that only a human being is allowed to touch.

Indeed, therein lies precisely the irony. Much management work is still treated as high-minded thinking, while in practice a significant part of it amounts to logistics for decision-making. Retrieving information. Summarizing. Structuring. Chasing. Summarize again. Checking that everyone has the same version in front of them. Asking where that one appendix went. Pretending that's all strategic depth, when sometimes it's just administrative friction in jacket form. Ouch. Yes. But also: ouch with good reason.

Michiel formulated it more soberly than I do now. He said that a surprisingly large part of his week was spent on documents that could have been shorter, consultations that could also have been a decision, and ambiguity that the organization often organized itself. That is not an admission of weakness, that is managerial honesty. And administrative honesty is rarer than a building permit without an extra round.

The joke about his digital replacement got even better when he sketched through what that should look like. No more human COO appearing physically in the office, but a digital doppelganger available via Teams or hologram, fed only real choices, exceptions and hammer pieces. No more endless piles of context, no more thirty pages of introduction before the question appears, no more administrative wallpaper masquerading as urgency. Just the essentials: what is the issue, what are the options, what are the risks, what should be decided now?

And let's face it: even if you laugh hard at it, it sounds suspiciously attractive.

Because ultimately, this is not about a director who wants to cut himself away in favor of a talking dashboard. This is about a sector that has deluded itself for too long that the problems are primarily outside. Housing shortage. Staff shortages. Affordability. Sustainability. Social impact. Pace. Quality. All true. All great. All urgent. But in the meantime, we still organize an amazing amount of work internally as if the world is uncluttered, linear and slow. As if information floats up by itself. As if letting knowledge sit in heads is a charming form of craftsmanship rather than an operational risk. As if busyness is an accomplishment.

That's the real clash that artificial intelligence exposes. Not that humans will suddenly become obsolete, but that a painfully large portion of the work we call human is in reality just poorly designed process work. No vision. No courage. No direction. No ownership. Just detours.

And that is precisely why this topic is more interesting than the bland April 1 hook alone. Because if artificial intelligence helps us find knowledge faster, make connections faster and prepare decisions more sharply, then it's not about replacing knowledge. Then it is about making knowledge usable. About discerning more quickly what is essential and what is administrative decorum. About wasting less time searching, coordinating, checking, retyping and covering. About making more room for what does make people unique: judgment, responsibility, direction and courage.

Filing moment

This is where the real wound is.
Not in the question of whether AI can replace a director, but in the much more uncomfortable question of how many parts of today's management work still justify a human doing them at all.

That's not an attack on directors. That's an attack on waste.
If a system can find more quickly what is relevant, summarize more consistently what needs to be decided and more sharply identify where ambitions are piling up without an owner, then it becomes visible how many human hours we have sacrificed for years on organized hassle. And perhaps that is the hardest lesson of all: not that the machine is getting smarter, but that for too long we have pretended that cumbersomeness was the same as importance.

So no, Michiel de Vries will not actually be replaced by a hologram with a mandate and a neat voice on March 31, 2030.
But anything in his position that doesn't require courage, judgment or responsibility frankly doesn't deserve to eat up endless human time either.

And that's the joke.
That we thought this was normal for so long.

About Pim's digital maze

In this column, Pim takes you into the sometimes wonderful, tangled but rapidly changing world of digitization. He draws on his experiences as director of digitalization at VORM. Pim is outspoken, critical, but above all wants to help you. Are you stuck in the digital maze? Pim helps you find the way out.... Do you have a question for Pim or are you looking to get in touch with him? Follow Pim on LinkedIN.