While headlines focus on AI-driven layoffs, leading companies are taking a different approach by using the groundbreaking tech to bolster their workforce rather than replace it.
AI is a double-edged sword. It can free people from the drudgery of insipid work, but take away creative tasks. It can save employees hours of work a week, only for those employees to be given even more work to fill that time, making them busier than ever. It can lower the cost of products and services that companies produce, cutting into revenues, but those lower costs can also create more demand for those goods and services, growing revenues.
Navigating these paradoxes is a challenge for company leaders. Worse yet, if they do find a path through, the technology changes overnight, and strategies can become obsolete.
Most recently, the advent of agentic AI promises to make AI systems more powerful, autonomous, and flexible, and able to take over even more tasks from humans. So the central concern in the AI debate is how it’s eliminating more jobs than it’s creating. In July alone, Microsoft said it was cutting more than 9,000 jobs, Intel was cutting more than 5,000, and Indeed and Glassdoor were cutting 1,300 jobs, all billed as part of a shift in focus to AI.
In total, more than 80,000 tech employees have been laid off so far this year, according to Layoffs FYI.
Cost savings was the top priority of early AI adopters, according to an April survey by Enterprise Strategy Group of 1,900 business and IT leaders, and 88% said they’ve already seen material improvements in efficiency. And, earlier this year, the World Economic Forum predicted 92 million jobs would be gone by 2030 because of AI.
So it’s no surprise that, according to a BCG survey released in June of more than 10,000 leaders, managers, and employees, 41% of employees think their jobs will certainly or probably disappear in the next 10 years. Given this climate of fear and apprehension, how can CIOs and other business leaders deploy gen AI and agentic systems in their organizations without kicking off an employee revolt? Do they lean into a culture of fear and force employees to either adapt to AI or get shown the door?
It’s a common mantra among tech executives these days that AI won’t take your job, but someone who knows AI will. And will life actually improve for employees who survive this process of elimination or will they have to work harder and produce more, even as AI takes away the creative aspects they most enjoy?
Nobody gets left behind
Parsons, a defense and critical infrastructure engineering firm, is an organization that’s already deploying AI agents for efficiency improvements and cost reductions. Some provision test environments and assess job candidates, and there’s AI for general employee productivity, and much more. Plus, the company is also building AI into its products and services.
The cultural issues are complex and challenging to deal with, says Jenn Bergstrom, the company’s VP of cloud and data. But the main focus of AI has been on augmenting employees, not replacing them.
“We might grow headcount slower but we’re not reducing it by implementing AI,” she says.
To further the point, Parsons is investing in upskilling and training programs, running gamification events around AI that include cash prizes, and paying bonuses for certifications. Plus, when employees gain skills they become eligible for promotions and other career-advancing opportunities. And this is translating into employee satisfaction, she says.
“Our retention numbers are better than they’ve been for over a decade, and part of it is we’ve been noticeably and vocally providing employees opportunities to upskill,” she adds. “I was a software engineer six years ago and now I run the cloud strategy for the company, and a lot of that is due to upskilling and training opportunities.”
And if a team of employees is 20% more efficient, it’ll get 20% more done, she says, as opposed to laying off a fifth of the team. To ensure that additional work needs to be done, AI is also being used to grow the business, which generates more revenue and creates more work for people to do. “You hired employees for a reason,” she says. “Value that, and help them grow.”
Behind the headlines
On the surface, it might seem naïve for companies to talk about AI building people up and improving jobs when there’s so much negative news about its potential impact on employment. For example, Ford CEO Jim Farley recently predicted that AI will replace half of all white-collar workers in the US. Also, Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman sent a memo to his team in which he said, “AI is coming for your job. Heck, it’s coming for my job, too. This is a wake-up call. It doesn’t matter if you’re a programmer, designer, product manager, data scientist, lawyer, customer support rep, salesperson, or a finance person. AI is coming for you.”
Several tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Salesforce have also been talking about how much of their work is already being done by AI. Of course, tech executives could just be hyping the technology they sell. But not all AI-related layoffs may actually be due to AI.
“You have to be careful when taking a company at its word,” says Emily DeJeu, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. “Maybe you hired too many people after the pandemic. Or maybe business has softened and you don’t want to admit it.” Another problem with looking at the headlines is that layoffs often happen en masse, but people are hired one at a time, and it’s the bad news that gets all the attention.
That WEF report, for example, predicted that also by 2030, 170 million new jobs would be created. It’s easy to see how jobs could be lost, but harder to imagine jobs that haven’t been created yet coming into existence. But they do. Before the industrial revolution, most of us were farmers. Machines took more than 90% of those jobs — a much bigger impact than any AI job loss projection.
So when will we see these new jobs being created? It’s already happening. Remember those 80,000 tech jobs lost since the start of the year? According to CompTIA, 90,000 new technology jobs were created in June alone, and the unemployment rate for technology occupations dropped to 2.8%.
And in a Linux Foundation survey of over 500 hiring managers, recruiters, and HR professionals, nearly three times more organizations expanded their workforce than reduced it due to AI, with a positive impact seen across all organization sizes, industry verticals, and geographical regions. For AI-related jobs specifically, 57% of respondents said they were adding people, while only 3% said they were decreasing headcount.
The organizational structure is already dead
AI, especially agentic AI, is changing the nature of work, and how companies will need to be organized, says Mary Alice Vuicic, chief people officer at Thomson Reuters. “Many companies ripped up their AI plans as agentic AI came to the forefront,” she says, as it’s moved on from being an assistant to being a team that works together to accomplish delegated tasks.
This has the potential for unprecedented productivity improvements, but also unprecedented opportunities for augmentation, expansion, and growth. “Our strategy incorporates both,” she says. And because AI isn’t just another technological tool but a fundamental change to how people work, Thomson Reuters’s AI transformation strategy is co-led by HR and technology.
“It’s equal parts change management, workforce upskilling, and technology,” she says. “And that’s key to unlocking both productivity and augmentation.”
The company has deployed AI to improve decision-making, provide better insights for salespeople, create faster and higher-quality code, and reach faster resolutions of customer queries through chatbots fueled by agentic frameworks. Not moving ahead is not an option.
“The work our customers do will change dramatically, and therefore our product roadmap and investment strategy need to change considerably,” she says. “Internally, we all need to adopt AI and rethink how we operate. We’re AI first and human-led. We want everyone to be regularly using AI tools by the end of the year.”
Thomson Reuters has also deployed its Open Arena platform, which provides access to more than 35 leading LLMs. Employees can experiment with everything from summarizing documents to building custom workflows. It also supports agentic functionality, such as the connection of gen AI models to a wider ecosystem of tools. This platform now has more than 19,000 monthly users, the company says.
“Top talent needs to know that their company is investing in keeping them relevant and growing their skills,” says Vuicic.
Everyone’s a creator
Gen AI allows anyone to be an artist, writer, composer, graphic designer, movie director, or software developer. That can be intimidating for people who used to have a monopoly on those skills, but now there’s creative opportunity for everyone. And it’s also an opportunity for companies to rethink who’ll get the opportunities to be creative in new areas.
Hristo Borisov, CEO at spending management company Payhawk, is seeing firsthand how AI is changing the way work is distributed. For example, the company’s head of HR is now the single owner of Payhawk’s new performance management system. At the direction of a business unit leader, not a technologist, the system was vibe-coded by company developers for a total personnel and technology cost of around $4,000, replacing a commercial system that cost $70,000 a year.
“If the VP of people has an idea for a new feature or capability, within a day she can have it live,” says Borisov. “She’s still telling her idea to the engineer, but the engineer doesn’t write code; they’re only responsible for asking AI to generate it, and that’s it.”
An engineer is still needed because application development requires an analytical understanding of all the different features, views, roles, and integrations with other systems. “She doesn’t need to know that,” says Borisov. “And if the AI doesn’t do something as expected, the person using it needs to be skillful enough to correct it, or explain things in more detail,” he says. But in two or three years, he adds, she’ll probably be able to tell the AI what she wants directly.
Other applications are already being built by non-technical employees, but they’re not business critical. Anything serious needs expert attention. If a vibe-coded application needs API access to internal systems, for example, then IT needs to get involved to provide the API key, and do a security review and code assurance.
“It’s not just about building the code,” he says. “Someone needs to test it, deploy it, make sure the security is there, and provide documentation about it.”
But as coding gets easier, it doesn’t mean there’s less work for the developers to do. As Payhawk’s performance management system replacement illustrates, when coding gets easier and cheaper, more coding projects can be brought in-house, and customized to meet a company’s needs.
It’s important for a company to have a positive vision for AI, says Edwige Sacco, head of workforce innovation at KPMG. It can improve the speed of organizations, make customer experiences more exciting, and sharpen focus on productivity improvements that are outcome-increasing instead of cost-reducing, she says.
“Yes, current roles will be eliminated,” she says. “But eliminated doesn’t mean the person goes away. It’s our job to figure out how to upskill, how to evolve the person to help them fit into the new role, or create a new role they can fit in with.”
And in the long term, AI can make work healthier. “AI is the key to recreating the work experience for people, for reigniting the passion of going to work,” says Sacco. “It also helps being creative and autonomous, but belonging to a team.”
