Dive Brief:
- By 2028, to sustain work transformation driven by artificial intelligence, organizations must make continuous work redesign a core capability, according to a Sept. 15 report from Gartner. The company estimated that businesses that do so will be twice as likely to succeed in their efforts.
- Continuous work redesign means redesigning talent strategies so employees and managers can learn, reskill, adjust and adapt on the fly as work evolves and AI reshapes jobs and responsibilities, Gartner explained in a media release.
- The ability of business leaders to anticipate and respond to these changes has been a top challenge for organizations today, studies repeatedly show. To address this, HR should prioritize talent mobility and adopt a more flexible approach to work planning and performance management so skills and capabilities can be rapidly deployed where they are needed most, the report recommended.
Dive Insight:
Faced with disruption brought on by the AI transformation, many business leaders may retain a “been there, done that” mindset toward change that could have significant consequences for productivity, according to a recent Insights report.
Instead, in the AI era, organizations need to move beyond static workforce planning and traditional job structures, Gartner said. Organizations that succeed “build the capability to redesign work in real time as technology, business priorities and workforce needs evolve,” Caroline Hewings, a senior director analyst in Gartner’s HR practice, stated in the release.
For instance, while traditional process maps describe how work is intended to occur, AI-enabled visibility shows how work is actually being performed, the global advisory firm noted. With continuous visibility, leaders can “identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies and improvement in real time rather than through periodic assessments,” Hewings explained.
AI also necessitates a new architecture, or “rebalancing,” for HR, a June report from The Josh Bersin Co. emphasized. As AI agents increasingly take on administrative heavy jobs, HR will still lead strategy, though companies are still figuring out how to instruct and manage AI agents to their fullest potential, Josh Bersin said.
Replacing HR with AI isn’t going to save much money, the firm added, because that would eliminate the employees with institutional knowledge and understanding of which tasks should be streamlined by an AI tool, where data may live to enable AI use, when AI makes an error and what will be crucial to fixing it.