For decades, many of the world’s highest-performing professions have been organized around an unspoken equation: excellence requires extraordinary endurance.
Long hours, constant responsiveness, and the ability to absorb relentless pressure served as signals of commitment and capability, seen as underpinning often extraordinary outcomes.
Now AI is rapidly changing how work can get done in these institutions. Most of the conversation focuses on productivity: how AI and agents might automate tasks, accelerate analysis, and reduce cost.
Those dimensions are critical. But a further upside matters too:
As capabilities accelerate, how do we also elevate the human experience of delivering excellence?
As AI changes the value equation of professional services and private sector work, it may also create a rare opportunity to rethink something more fundamental: how professions are designed, and what those systems offer to and demand from the people inside them.
That raises questions for leaders across industries:
● Will AI merely accelerate the pace and pressure of professional work, or will it allow us to redesign these professions and organizations so that elevated excellence and personal sustainability can coexist more often?
● And as productivity increases dramatically, how can institutions ensure that the newly unlocked value is shared meaningfully across the broader ecosystem?
At bottom, one question is this: What should high-performance systems look like in the AI and agentic era?
The Hidden Cost of Endurance
High-performance professions and corporate institutions have long created enormous value for society. Lawyers define and shape how markets operate, navigate risk and opportunity, defend rights, negotiate terms, and enforce the rules that hold people and systems accountable. Financial professionals match buyers and sellers, get value-creating deals done, grow wealth enabling financial freedom, and reduce transaction costs. Consultants guide transformation, bring strategic insight and deliver pattern recognition. Executives and individual contributors deliver on objectives, allocate capital and steer organizations through compounding complexity.
For years, many of these systems relied on human grit because there was no other way. Sheer endurance and relentless intensity were often the only path to delivering that level of excellence at scale.
But that endurance has come at a real cost.
Behind structured markets, guided transformations, outsized returns and governed risk are people who have often accepted chronic sleep debt, missed life milestones, and sustained pressure as the price of admission to the top of their fields. In many professions, these norms became embedded in the identity of the work itself.
Research illustrates the consequences of this intensity: to take the legal field as an example, nearly one-third of lawyers report symptoms of depression, significant numbers struggle with severe anxiety, and more than one-fifth show signs of problematic alcohol use — rates notably higher than in many other professions. Additionally, nearly four in ten stressed leaders have considered stepping away from leadership roles altogether, and roughly 77 percent of professionals have said they experience burnout.
The rapid integration of AI into knowledge-work institutions creates a rare opportunity to rethink how some of our most influential professional systems are designed.
A Long Thread in My Own Hopeful Thinking
This question of making high-performance institutions both successful and sustainable has been on my mind for some time.
In 2020, while I was a partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, I wrote about how tackling employee wellbeing was still too often burdened by stigma when challenges arose. I returned to the same theme in a 2023 interview:
“Advancing mental health and wellbeing in high-performing organizations is foundational to innovation, teamwork, recruitment and retention of top talent and sustained outperformance.”
When I moved into the C-suite at Salesforce, it became clear that we now have tools and platforms, such as agentic AI across systems of engagement, agency, work and context, that allow institutions to act on those insights in ways that were previously impossible.
AI in Action: From Endurance to Enablement
The promise of alleviating professional burnout is no longer theoretical, but it will also be an on-going journey. At Salesforce, we seek to implement what this redesign can look like in practice by enabling customers and governments to become agentic enterprises, including building legal, compliance, risk and business functions that are AI-native, trust-first, and agentic.
For instance, consider the ever-increasing volume of legal questions that flow daily across a large enterprise and the time and stress it takes to review, triage, and respond to each one. At Salesforce, we addressed this directly by deploying an AI agent into designated channels, enabling instant, grounded responses to routine legal questions without requiring attorney intervention for each one, expanding capacity for teams to collaborate and tackle higher-stakes, complex, judgement-heavy and relationship-driven matters.
Tools like Slackbot and other applications further illustrate how agentic AI can support professionals at the individual level to meet demands in a more productive and sustainable way. By referencing context from inboxes, calendars, and scattered documents, employees can surface information, catch up on what matters, and streamline prep materials. The accumulation of small but impactful efficiencies—minutes and hours returned, mental overhead reduced, attention restored—significantly decreases the overall administrative burden for the team, and allows them to spend more time on more strategic and high-judgement tasks.
These are merely early examples along the journey of proving that when work is more sustainable with expanded opportunities to be creative and deploy your strengths, it’s often more enjoyable. New AI tools will also be developed to tackle wellness more directly and help people in need.
Turning Strategy into Structure: The LCAio Initiative
To further that vision of AI empowerment, in January 2026, we combined our legal innovation and operations functions into a single integrated organization: LCA Innovation & Operations, or LCAio.
It is a deliberate structural bet on the future of an agentic enterprise, built to bring innovation and operations under one roof as we redesign work itself, augmenting humans and re-envisioning roles by leveraging agents, data, applications and AI, to drive simplification and acceleration, strengthen collaboration, enable faster learning loops, and expand pathways for development, service and improvement.
But the animating vision behind the promise of human-agent collaboration is not purely about speed, growth or efficiency. Our prior strategic planning had already articulated a deeper goal: finding joy and integrity in what we do and how we do it, allowing our teams to reinvigorate their professional purpose and become future-ready.
That aspiration gives our AI transformation its human center of gravity. When launching the new organization, I asked the team to rally around a single guiding question:
How do we make your work life simpler, more sustainable, more pleasant, and more productive?
For us, the beginning of the answer includes using AI agents to simplify and re-imagine workflows, automate high-volume repetitive work, augment deep thinking, and build deep agentic competence so that our people can develop cutting-edge skills, spend more of their time orchestrating excellence and do more of what requires judgment, oversight, creativity, and human insight at scale.
Productivity Versus System Outcomes
In high-performance environments, AI will increase throughput. It also holds the promise of improving the underlying human experience.
Leaders who tackle how to translate productivity into more sustainable and enhanced outperformance, more durable operating systems, and better-designed systems of work will achieve better outcomes, attract and retain top talent and model the best of what this new era can positively enable and create.
That is an additional test as work and society are transformed. This is part of what the new agentic alchemy could deliver.
Leaders now face a choice: use AI to intensify existing processes, expectations and systems or use AI to re-imagine and re-design them to convert gains into superior system and human outcomes.
A New Operating System for Excellence
For too long, silent endurance has been the operating system of many professions. As Arianna Huffington and others have argued for years, we need to redefine how to maximize success.
With AI we have an opportunity to create and implement a better operating system. This will include connecting more deeply to our purpose, allocating effort to that which gives you energy rather than drains it, learning from those on the front lines, empowering more stakeholders, streamlining and simplifying processes, improving how people make decisions, identifying risk earlier and mitigating risk more expansively, creating greater capacity and clarity for achieving institutional and individual missions and helping people and organizations better fulfill their purpose and contribute to the communities they serve.
And so the gains shouldn’t only benefit institutions. In my recent open letter to law firms and professional services firms, I reinforce that this value should also be shared with clients and communities. And my broader call to action to regulated industries, that the agentic era demands their leadership because the organizations we most admire understand that agentic transformation done right should create value that flows outward, underscores that if AI benefits the enterprise without delivering stakeholder success, then that is not progress, it is risk in disguise.
The question to leaders is no longer about working faster. It’s about how we seize this moment to redesign institutions so that high performance and human flourishing can co-exist, unlocking benefits and value for all stakeholders. This is how the next generation of high-performance professions and enterprises will be finally built for excellence without exhaustion.