In July 2023 I published a piece called Shifting Gears. I had been reading a 2006 Harvard Business Review article, Second in Command. Nathan Bennett and Stephen Miles were talking about how hard it was to define the COO role and they came up with seven different types of COOs instead of one concrete role definition. I stole their method and drew my own seven for startups: the Integrator, the Growth Architect, the Data-Driven Strategist and so on. While I was writing I felt that the Data-Driven Strategist COO type is the closest to me, but I admitted at the end that the list didn’t feel finished.
Four months later I became a full-time COO for the first time, at Talent Protocol, a nine-person tech startup in Lisbon. I held the job for almost three years, through a token launch, a change of business model (like any other startup), and incorporating a company in a country (hello Marshall Islands) whose rules I had to learn from scratch. The company was acquired in August 2026 and I closed that chapter.
Somewhere in the last year of my Talent Protocol journey, I noticed my job was shrinking. The strange part is that nobody took my job away from me. It was a quiet transition.
It started with Pedro, our CEO. He started building his own chief of staff agent (its name is MacGyver). Then he had different agents for different business problems such as sales operations. When a new one came up, he opened a new agent rather than a new thread with me. I knew that he was not avoiding me. Basically he was faster on his own.
The same thing was happening with our CPO, Filipe, who is the most AI-native product person I have worked with. Filipe started asking me less often for the analyses and reports he used to ask me for in the pre-AI days, because he too was now getting faster results on his own, thanks to AI-powered tools or agents. And similar things were true for our CTO, Leal, as well as the other team members.
On my side, the same thing was happening to the tasks I had been proud of. The support-ticket triage I used to do by hand ran as an agent in Notion. The dashboards I had built to avoid briefing an agency now refreshed themselves. In early 2026 I shipped a Google Analytics feature with Cursor without writing the code myself, and the developers reviewed it like any other pull request.
I was becoming a more AI-native COO, but I am sure that if Talent Protocol had continued, my role would have been part-time by the end of 2026. The main reason was that the work that made it a full-time job kept moving into agents that Pedro, Filipe and Leal could run themselves.
Then I started working with companies that are not tech companies, and saw the opposite.
Two futures, one question
There are two sides to the pattern that I see now. The side you are on depends on one thing: Is there anyone who builds with technology (especially AI) on your leadership team already?
In a tech company, the answer is yes. There is a CTO, often a CPO, and a CEO who is comfortable opening a terminal. When AI arrives, they pick it up the way they picked up every other tool. The CEO and CTO combo (sometimes the CTO and CPO pair) absorbs the operational work into agents they own: Reporting, process, tracking, the first draft of everything. As you can imagine, each of these moves out of the COO’s hands and into a workflow one of them owns. In the end the COO does not get fired but gets diluted.
I don’t know if this is accurate for every tech company. It was accurate for my story and Talent.
Outside tech, no. The leadership team is the founder, maybe a partner, maybe a head of sales. These types of companies buy the technology; they don’t build it. There is no CTO on their team to absorb anything. The tools the business already uses hold a piece of the picture, and they don’t have anyone who has the job of putting the pieces together.
In those companies, the COO is the one who carries the transition. If there is no COO, the owner steps in. Actually I agree with Alex Hormozi on this (especially for a small business): The person who runs the business learns to build their own workflow first. On the other hand, this is not the answer for everyone. An owner who is the whole sales function, or who has no patience for tools or technology, will not do it.
That is when hiring a COO makes sense, with a different job description than the one I wrote about in 2023. The job of this new type of COO is to implement AI in the workflows first and lead the operations second. This new role needs basic technical literacy (I’m not talking about coding). It means being comfortable connecting two tools to each other, reading a data export without flinching, writing a procedure clearly enough that a person or an agent can follow it. Most importantly, this type of COO should know when a workflow is ready to hand off. That combination is rarer than it sounds, and it is exactly what the transition needs.
The seven types from 2023 are still there, if you want them. But the fork that matters is above them. In a tech company the COO’s job is to make itself smaller with grace. Outside tech, the COO’s job is to become, for a while, the CTO the company never had.
What this changes
For a COO in a tech company, the best move is to be the person who leads the dilution of their own position. When they act this way instead of resisting the change, I see it as likely to trigger a transformation in their own capabilities too.
For COOs of companies outside tech, the job description and its scope are expanding. These COOs will do more than implement a new tool: they will change how their company works.
Whether tech or non-tech, the same question applies to every founder. Who will take on this transformation role? It could be the founder themselves. It could be an ops lead already on the team. But those founders do not have the luxury of saying nobody will take it.
What I’m still figuring out
Of course I know that real life is different from this. There are tech companies where the COO role will continue because the CEO does not want to roll up their own sleeves. There are also non-tech companies where an ambitious IT manager on the team takes on the change instead of a COO. I just haven’t met them yet.
My experience is with smaller-scale companies. That’s why I leave how the team should be structured for this transformation in mid-to-large companies to people who know that field.
If my predictions above about tech companies are right, it means the COO role I held for three years is shrinking (mixed feeling emojis here). That’s exactly why I now spend my time on the other side of the fork.
Stay human.
Tolga
References
Shifting Gears: The Dynamic COO Role in Startups & My Experience, Business × AI, July 2023.
Nathan Bennett and Stephen A. Miles, Second in Command: The Misunderstood Role of the Chief Operating Officer, Harvard Business Review, May 2006.
Alex Hormozi, How to Use AI in Your Business in 2026, YouTube.