Designing The Future Of Work: The Human/Agent Workforce
AI is changing how work gets done: not by replacing roles outright, but by reshaping the tasks within them. Accenture modeling shows that 44% of working hours in the US are in scope for automation or augmentation. LinkedIn found that 20% of US professionals hired today have job titles that didn’t even exist in 2000.
As automation accelerates and agentic tools become more capable, organizations face a critical question: how should work be redesigned to support both people and intelligent systems?
The answer isn’t just technical. It’s strategic, structural, and human. This is the Great AI Workforce Redesign.
From Tool Adoption To Workforce Design
While AI investment is growing, many companies are still treating it as a bolt-on: layering new tools over outdated structures. But that approach misses the bigger opportunity. If we want AI to deliver real value, we need to look deeper: at how work is defined, how skills are developed, and how people and systems interact.
Organizations that take a human-first approach to transformation are seeing tangible gains. Salesforce research, for example, shows that daily AI users report increased productivity (64%), focus (58%), and job satisfaction (81%).
These outcomes don’t come from the technology alone – they come from designing systems that make it easier for people to work with it.
Rethinking Roles, Tasks, and Talent
At Beamery, we see more organizations starting to question the traditional model of jobs and org charts. As AI becomes more capable of handling individual tasks, the idea of a fixed role becomes less useful. What matters more is understanding what work needs to be done, what skills it requires, and who (or what) is best suited to do it.
This shift demands new ways of thinking about:
- Task-level job redesign: Breaking work down into tasks rather than rigid job descriptions.
- Skills mapping: Identifying the capabilities required for each task and recognizing transferable or adjacent skills across the workforce.
- Talent allocation: Using both human and AI capacity to assign work optimally, rather than defaulting to roles alone.
- Continuous learning: Building structures for upskilling and reskilling as capabilities evolve.
A More Adaptable Workforce
What’s needed now is not just more AI tools, but more workforce adaptability. That means making work more flexible, making talent more mobile, and making the relationship between people and systems more collaborative.
It also means building the infrastructure to understand your workforce in a more granular way: by skill, by potential, by evolving capability.
This is where much of the real innovation is happening – not just in model development, but in how organizations are beginning to treat skills and tasks as dynamic components that can be reorganized in response to change.
Looking Ahead
The future of work will likely be shaped by a mix of human creativity and autonomous systems working together. But getting there isn’t just a technology problem. It’s an organizational design challenge.
AI will continue to shift how work is done – and the organizations that take a more deliberate, people-focused approach to redesigning that work will be better placed to adapt.
As Nathalie Scardino, President & Chief People Officer at Salesforce, says, “Like with any technological revolution, the net increase in opportunity will outweigh the disruption – but how we get there is the key to unleashing our unlimited potential.”
The transition is already underway. The question is whether we build systems that let people thrive in it – or systems that leave human potential underutilized. Those who embrace AI as a partner in work redesign, rather than as a replacement, will define the next era of productivity, creativity, and workforce resilience.