In this blog post, I am seeking an answer to what challenges the rise of AI presents to people leaders. What will be the role of humans in a hybrid workplace shared with AI Agents? Will they be reduced to the maintenance staff, making sure the AI machine is properly oiled? Or will AI help people to use their full potential at work at a level we have not seen before?
How can leaders help to realise the optimistic scenario of people blooming on AI steroids? What new skills will be required from them? How does the work itself need to be redefined?
Why is being able to discover any skills and the entire potential of your employees more important now than ever?
Enjoy reading and share your thoughts.
Wojciech Pozarzycki, July 21, 2025
Robots are among us
The robots are already working with humans in your organisation. According to the latest ABSL report on Business Services in Poland, almost 75% of them are already using Intelligent Process Automation (IPA). Probably due to the low coverage of automation, the robotic “colleagues” may remain invisible in your organisation. Less than one-fifth of the process is automated according to the ABSL. But the trend is clear, and with the frenzy rush to adopt GenAI (85% of centres are positive about GenAI), we may expect a dramatic increase in AI Agents that your team will interact with.
As a responsible leader, you should ask yourself what it means for you, for your people, your stakeholders and in general for the way of working.
AI Agents need people. But for what?
The early adoption of AI is heading in the wrong direction. The generative AI, as its name suggests, generates a lot of content, but cannot execute simple tasks. It can draft an impressive employer branding campaign, but it will fail to buy you a ticket to the next industry event. What is the most common response? We leave this clerical task to the human.
The GenAI can use its unleashed “imagination” to make up facts, even books and movies and court sentences. How do we address it? We leave the fact-checking up to the human.
Is this the future we want for our teams? Do we all want to end up in roles similar to the human supervisor in the “autonomous” cars, who sits in the driver seat in a fancy car but cannot enjoy driving it until a critical situation, only to be blamed for the lack of reaction when the technology fails?
I believe there is an alternative to this “Black Mirror” style scenario. Pascal Bornet and company draft an alternative path for applying AI in their “Agentic Artificial Intelligence” book.
They believe the future lies in equipping AI with the capability to execute tasks by combining it with robotic process automation (RPA).
Agentic AI behave as “autonomous actors” capable of planning, decision-making, and executing multi-step tasks with minimal human intervention. They can reduce the staff burnout by offloading routine tasks, allowing employees to focus on activities that require emotional intelligence, creative problem-solving, and strategic thinking.
With this approach, humans remain an internal part of the workforce of the future. A promising example is given by Novo Nordisk, where “Agentic AI is about empowering our people to do better work, not cutting corners”.
To bring this positive, at least for humans, scenario into life, leaders must foster trust and collaboration, creating an environment where employees understand how AI agents complement their work rather than replace it. Pascal Bornet’s book on AI Agents emphasises the need for a new mindset and skills for effective leadership in a world where humans and AI agents collaborate seamlessly. This paradigm shift requires leaders to function as “curators and guides” to ensure AI outcomes align with company values. They can achieve it through:
• Empowering AI training and collaboration: Equipping employees with tailored training and positioning AI as a strategic partner, not a replacement
• Blending automation with human interaction: Ensuring that while automation drives efficiency, human touchpoints are maintained for engagement and morale
• Amplifying employee voices for innovation: Leveraging AI-powered feedback tools to gather insights and foster a culture of continuous improvement
• Prioritising ethical leadership: Taking an active role in ensuring AI technologies are designed and used responsibly, addressing risks related to accuracy, privacy breaches, and biases
• Addressing trust issues proactively: Training employees on data privacy and responsible use to build trust and counter ethical objections
Preparing your employees to embrace AI technology is just one aspect of addressing the future. To utilise the full potential of new hybrid AI-human workplaces, you need to rethink what and how you do at work.
Redesign your work
Ravin Jesuthasan, from Mercer, argues that leaders need to embark on a fundamental redesign of work. This is because traditional structures are “crumbling under the weight of change”, leading many businesses to struggle with AI’s promised gains due to a failure to rethink underlying work structures. This requires a “work-backward” approach instead of a “tech-forward” one.
This new approach, as outlined in the MIT Business Review article, involves three key phases: deconstruct, redeploy, and reconstruct.
Deconstruct the Work: Leaders must break down existing and emerging tasks into their elemental components. This allows for a granular understanding of which activities can be substituted by AI, augmented by AI, or transformed entirely. This initial step is crucial because the real value be achieved only by starting with the work to be done, not the technology that might affect it”.
Redeploy the Activities: Once tasks are deconstructed, they can be redeployed to the optimal solutions. This might involve assigning tasks to AI and automation. Still, it also opens up opportunities to shift work to other resources, such as more junior talent or global capability centres, which may not have been envisioned in the original business cases. AI and automation are changing the economic model of work by bending the demand curve, meaning organisations can achieve growth with less resource intensity and greater flexibility. The “experience premium” is reduced as AI democratises knowledge, allowing less-experienced talent to operate at higher proficiency.
Reconstruct New Ways of Working: The final stage involves clarifying how a new, AI-augmented way of working has been reconstructed. This requires leaders to think holistically about their entire tech stack, recognising how generative AI can be a “force multiplier” for existing technologies. It’s about designing work that enables human-AI collaboration to deliver better services, drive more innovation, and achieve stronger results.
Jesuthasan further outlines several actions for organisations to navigate this shift:
• Start with the work: Prioritise understanding the tasks to be done before applying technology,
• Think about your entire tech stack: View AI not as a standalone tool but as something that multiplies the power of existing technologies,
• Think beyond AI: Consider all redeployment options, including junior talent and global capability centres, to maximise ROI,
• Make work design a core organisational capability: Realising AI’s promise requires the efforts of an organisation’s entire leadership team, ensuring “perpetual reinvention”.
This strategic approach underscores that AI’s promise goes beyond mere cost reduction. For global IT delivery hubs, this means a concerted effort:
• Integrating AI with human potential: The sector is shifting towards “Generative Business Services” (GBS 3.0), where AI doesn’t just optimise tasks but co-creates solutions, fundamentally redesigning business processes end-to-end.
• Fostering an agile learning culture: The shelf life of tech skills is estimated at just 2.5 years, making continuous upskilling and reskilling vital for an “AI literate” and “cloud-native” workforce capable of critical thinking in AI-infused environments
• Embracing decentralised decision-making: Agentic AI can provide valuable insights and recommendations at every level, allowing teams to operate with greater flexibility and autonomy
Discover the hidden skills of your employees
Even if you have a great job description in your organisation, chances are that you are blind to many valuable skills your employees may possess. That great leader of the quality assurance team may run the data science project as a volunteer in the local astronomy association. And one of your Java developers has just completed a postgraduate psychology study. Probably, their direct supervisors are aware of it, but you are missing the big picture or a map of all the available skills in your team.
Having the map outlining the capabilities of your team is crucial in navigating your team’s future in the time of AI-driven disruption. As you redesign your work as described in the previous chapter, knowing the skills of your team is critical to utilise its full potential in the new work setup.
This is precisely what I did when I was responsible for the Global Integration Team, facing the technology shift from EDI to API integrations. Knowing the skills and interests of the team members helped me assemble the API integration team, the trailblazers who set the path for transformation.
The good news is that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. There are frameworks, such as SOFIA (Skills Framework for the Information Age), that provide the structure and common language for discovering and managing skills within your organisation.
Lead humans and AI Agents with heart and data
There is hope that we can avoid living in the “Black Mirror” world. Agentic AI can serve humans by executing real tasks and leaving the creation, empathy, and supervision to humans.
To sail in the direction of the positive scenario, you have to act now. Here are some areas that should sit high on the priority list of every leader:
Embrace Agentic AI: explore and invest in “Agentic Artificial Intelligence” solutions that empower AI to execute tasks autonomously, freeing up my human workforce for higher-value activities.
Map Employee Skills. Utilise frameworks like SOFIA (Skills Framework for the Information Age) to discover and map the full range of skills and capabilities within your team. Use this knowledge to redesign your work and processes.
Foster Trust and Ethical Leadership. Ensure the ethical design and responsible use of AI technologies, and foster an environment where employees understand how AI agents complement their work.
Being a people leader was always a demanding role, and it does not seem to be any lighter now with the rise of AI Agents. However, it may also be as rewarding as it has never been before.
Sources:
“Agentic Artificial Intelligence” by Pascal Bornet and company
https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/want-ai-driven-productivity-redesign-work
Business Services in Poland 2025 – ABSL
https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-to-scale-genai-in-the-workplace