Blog
From jobs to value - reinventing talent strategy with a human+ AI workforce
10-minute read
December 8, 2025
For decades, leaders and organizations have chased efficiency: leaner teams, faster processes and more automation. AI isn’t just about making existing operations better. AI creates fundamentally new opportunities for people and technology to come together and unlock potential that wasn’t visible before. It lets us see work at an unprecedented level of detail, showing exactly how tasks, skills and technology combine to drive results.
AI’s greatest impact doesn’t come from automation alone – it comes from understanding work and redesigning it for better outcomes. The next wave of value will come from unlocking new human potential with technology.
The performance illusion
Picture this: A global bank invests millions in AI, expecting a big jump in productivity. Six months later, the dashboards look great, automation has increased, transaction times are down. But customer satisfaction hasn’t moved, and employee engagement is slipping.
Why? Because the organization is still designed around old jobs and structures and not around improving how the work gets done. The result? Speed without real progress. People are still doing what machines could do better. Machines miss what only people can bring—judgment, creativity and empathy.
Unlocking value: seeing work at a new level
For years, leaders have managed headcount and the shape of organizational pyramids. But how the work really happens is often a black box. Job descriptions list responsibilities but they don’t really capture what drives impact. Organization charts show hierarchies, but not contributions. Most rely on guesswork and lagging metrics.
This is changing. AI and automation make work visible at the task level. With the help of AI, we can take a new, end-to-end view of work and reveal activities with new levels of clarity, factoring in industry context, business operations and macroeconomic trends. Advanced AI models quickly analyze the information to create practical scenarios that show the best way to get tasks done, whether by humans, machines or a combination. This rapid, real-time visibility lets leaders pinpoint where machines add value and where human skills make the biggest difference.
Breaking work into its component parts reveals efficiencies and creates a common language: a shared understanding of how value flows across people, processes and technology.
This new level of visibility shifts the question from “How can we do this with fewer people?” to “How should this activity be designed to create better outcomes for innovation, growth and productivity?”
The ambition-action gap
Our research shows the gap between ambition and action. 84% of executives plan to redesign roles and teams around AI agents within five years. 38% of C-suite leaders anticipate that AI will change roles significantly. Yet only one in five are rethinking the way work gets done with AI at the core. This gap defines where the next wave of competitive advantage will be won or lost.
When work is deconstructed, a powerful principle emerges: match the mode of work to the source of value. Some tasks are best done by machines, while others require human imagination and ethical judgment.
Seeing work differently is only the beginning. The real breakthrough comes when leaders use this clarity to move talent where it matters most, build the right skills and make bolder choices about investment, resourcing, location strategy, role design and team structures.
A new talent blueprint: building a dynamic workforce with AI
A human+ AI talent strategy uses data and AI to continuously match human strengths with technological capabilities. It shifts beyond today’s roles and designs systems that evolve with the work itself. It combines the strengths of people and technology to take advantage of their respective strengths, to solve problems and deliver breakthrough results.
This shift changes how organizations measure workforce capabilities, direct investment and drive growth. Instead of optimizing for hierarchy, leaders can redesign for value. Not only for efficiency but also for human ingenuity.
As work is redeployed across humans and machines, success depends on how effectively leaders orchestrate these into a coherent, value-creating whole. Tasks now shift fluidly across five interconnected workforces:
- Human workforce: applying empathy, ethical judgment, creativity, leadership.
- Human+ machine collaboration: amplifying what people do with digital tools.
- Intelligent automation workforce: applying technology to rules-based, repetitive tasks.
- Generative AI workforce: creating content, designs, insights, code.
- Agentic AI workforce: engaging autonomous agents in managing multi-step processes.
The building blocks of agentic AI
Agentic architecture organizes AI agents into a hierarchy that drives efficient workflows and decision-making. The foundation is Utility Agents, which handle tasks like data collection, sorting and analysis. Utility agents ensure smooth, repetitive processes run without friction.
Super Agents act as managers. They oversee Utility Agents, coordinate workflows and ensure alignment with broader objectives. Super Agents orchestrate complex task sequences with advanced reasoning, turning tactical execution into strategic impact.
Above this, Orchestrator Agents manage interactions across multiple Super Agents and sometimes directly with Utility Agents. Orchestrator Agents ensure harmony and scalability across enterprise-wide operations. This tiered approach enables businesses to automate tasks as well as entire workflows, driving productivity, cost efficiency and innovation at scale.
Imagine a task starting with a human, moving to automation for efficiency, scaling with the help of generative AI and returning to human oversight for ethical nuance, sometimes orchestrated entirely by agentic AI. This isn’t theory – it is happening now.
Success depends on dynamically allocating work to the most capable worker, whether human, machine or human+ machine. Organizations must continuously adjust this balance as people and technologies evolve.
Agentic architecture organizes AI agents into a hierarchy that drives efficient workflows and decision-making.
AGENTIC AI
Utility Agents
_____
the first hierarchy that handles tasks such as data collection, sorting and analysis. Utility agents ensure smooth, repetitive processes run without friction.
AGENTIC AI
Super Agents
_____
manage Utility Agents, coordinating workflows and aligning tasks with broader objectives. They use advanced reasoning to turn tactical execution into strategic impact.
AGENTIC AI
Orchestrator Agents
_____
coordinate Super and Utility Agents to ensure harmony and scalability across operations, automating workflows to boost productivity, efficiency and innovation.
Turning visibility into action
Early movers show what’s possible when organizations start to reimagine work.
These aren’t yet fully implemented changes, but they’re signals of the emerging future as organizations gain visibility into how work truly creates value.
A blueprint for leaders: transforming talent strategy with AI-driven insights
To unlock the full potential of AI in your talent strategy, start with three no-regret moves:
Deconstruct jobs into tasks, using AI. This view can be developed using existing job hierarchies and a combination of internal and external sources.
Rebalance the tasks that humans, automation and AI are asked to do based on strategic impact, not just cost, supported by clear communication and trust-building.
Build AI fluency, orchestration capability and adaptive learning systems ahead of the technology and changes in work.
In the near term, leaders should focus on foundational readiness. This includes building AI literacy, governance and cultural alignment while creating change capabilities to drive transparency and help build trust. Over the medium term, leaders will need to embed agility into operating models, redefining governance, structures and talent models to accelerate results.
The best leaders see AI as a tool for purposeful design and disciplined management. They use it to create organizations that learn as fast as technology evolves.
The human advantage
The future of work will be humans and AI working together in new, complementary ways. Talent strategy needs to orchestrate work effectively across different workforces—human, automated, generative and agentic—and to build workplaces that are more adaptive. The real benefit is the ability to shift time and resources toward creativity and problem-solving and to create new jobs and ways of working that drive productivity and engagement. It’s also a powerful opportunity to build organizations that have more flexibility and can respond more effectively to changes in the external environment. The outcome isn’t only efficiency. It’s the opportunity to create new capacity and to reinvest time into the most important business priorities today and tomorrow.
The leaders who truly see this opportunity aren’t simply adding AI to old processes. They are completely redesigning work, creating more dynamic approaches to building skills and redesigning organizations for more adaptability and resilience.
Because in the end, when people and AI team up, there’s no limit to what can be achieved.