November Virtual: HR Technology
Why AI Is Forcing Companies to Rethink What a Job Is
The rapid maturity of AI is changing the question HR leaders ask when they’re talking about jobs. Where leaders once asked, “Who can do this job?,” they’re now asking, “What combination of human and AI can do it best?”This is a natural next revolution of the “skills-based hiring” model that shifted job paradigms away from role descriptions and toward equipping workers with specific capabilities the organization needs. And that goes for AI agents too. One of AI assistant Claude’s new features is actually called “skills.”Headlines make it sound like AI is wiping out jobs by the thousand, but “there’s a lot more at play there,” says Lisa Highfield, the principal director of HR tech and AI at the consulting firm McLean & Company. Some companies are going through typical reorganizations while others are simply responding to market downturns. “We’re not seeing the masses of AI job reduction that a lot of these headlines sometimes indicate.”While displacement is not yet widespread, companies are experimenting with augmenting workers–and sometimes replacing them, yes–with AI. Startups like Artisan and Viven are building “AI coworkers” and “digital twins,” and attracting tens of millions of dollars in venture funding. Yet few are forecasting human irrelevance. Even Artisan CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, whose company is probably best known for its provocative “Stop Hiring Humans” marketing campaign, told TechCrunch that he doesn’t believe AI will replace most human labor. “Human labor becomes more valuable when you have the AI content,” he said. In fact, the company has been hiring all year. It’s more likely that we will see more human-AI partnership in the workplace.How far up the ladder could this go? Hanneke Faber, CEO of global tech manufacturing company Logitech, says that she would entertain the idea of an AI agent joining her board of directors. “We already use [AI agents] in almost every meeting,” Faber told the audience last week at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women conference. “As they evolve—and some of the best agents or assistants that we’ve built actually do things themselves—that comes with a whole bunch of governance things. You have to keep in mind and make sure you really want that bot to take action. But if you don’t have an AI agent in every meeting, you’re missing out on some of the productivity.”Many leaders are putting faith in AI as a productivity booster. A leaked message from a Meta executive told workers that they should be working five times faster, thanks to AI. Even companies just dabbling in automation are using AI to handle repetitive tasks like data entry and reporting, while augmenting others, like analysis and strategy. Employees are reporting time savings. At HR tech company Deputy, employees using AI tools report saving five to ten hours per week. At media company Scripps, 20% of newsroom workers using AI for just one or two hours per day say they save roughly 20 minutes of total work time.Nascent AI practices are not without their problems, of course. Employees are frustrated by the amount of “workslop,” or AI-generated content void of substance, being served up, forcing humans to clean up after the machines. It’s become so common that colleagues are reportedly losing trust in each other. “We think [AI] will reduce our workload,” said Sue Cantrell, a work futurist at Deloitte. “But in reality, many workers are finding it increases their workload. It can also increase feelings of loneliness when they’re working more with AI than with their colleagues.”Yet thanks to AI, workforce planning is becoming more nimble. Cantrell recently met with a company developing a tool that lets managers click a button to see who, or what, has the right skills for a given task. That could mean a full-time employee, a contractor, or even an AI agent. With that data, managers can more accurately forecast headcount, fill roles, and seek out needed skills. HR already has a wealth of information about employees and their skills, and applying some smart AI can help compile skills ontologies and find workers who have them. Highfield believes that, aside from cost efficiency, this is the greatest opportunity AI has afforded so far.Companies are using technology that can deconstruct jobs into skills, then assess workers for skills, and match the two. But this model, so far, breaks down when it comes to work that requires higher-level thinking. Cantrell said that some skills–like creativity, empathy, and strategic thinking–can’t be cleanly parsed from the people who have them, and atomizing such work can kill not only the nuance, but also the joy. “Tasks are the actual activities underneath the job, and skills are the actual capabilities that workers bring,” Cantrell parsed. Not all work can, or should, be chopped into its component parts.In some organizations, the lines between people and technology are blurring at the structural level. Cantrell points to companies, like Moderna and Covisian, that have merged their HR and IT departments. IT’s role is to figure out how to perform work with technology, one leader told her, while HR’s role is to figure out how to perform work with people. Now companies are experimenting with bringing the roles together, though at least one leading HR thinker calls it a “senseless” endeavor. Stay tuned for more on that one.Work performed by both humans and machines, in parallel or in concert, may define the next revolution of business transformation. Think beyond efficiency, Cantrell said. Companies often think of AI as task replacement, but she believes “it’s an opportunity to reinvent the way we’re working.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Featured image by Gremlin/iStock by Getty Images)
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