AI and the workforce are now connected across every major leadership decision: roles, skills, training, productivity, trust, job design, and human judgment. As AI moves into daily work, employees need to know how their roles will change, what skills matter, when to rely on AI, and where people remain accountable for the outcome.
Leaders have to manage more than tools; they have to manage uncertainty, confidence, skill development, and the relationship between people and technology. To understand what leaders need to know about AI and the workforce, I asked a wide range of executives to share their perspectives on AI right now and what leaders should understand.
AI and the Workforce
Sean Desmond, CEO of nCino: Leaders should start by asking themselves a simple question: What does work look like when every employee has an AI teammate? We’re moving toward a future where organizations will have a dual workforce of humans and AI agents, and I believe the most successful companies will be those that combine AI’s speed and scale with the context, decision-making, and expertise that only people can provide. When that balance is right, AI can handle many routine and repetitive tasks, allowing employees at all levels to focus on work that requires judgment, creativity, and human connection. That shift is already underway: we recently found that 4 in 5 bankers are prioritizing AI adoption over ROI. The challenge for leaders will therefore be to rethink processes, roles, and ROI to take full advantage of what’s possible.
John Bartleman, President and CEO of TradeStation: Leaders need to understand that the pace of AI innovation is substantial and not a five-year trend. We’re in the midst of it, and it has changed how we manage our day-to-day lives, whether it be for work or for personal reasons. The biggest shift I’ve seen is from data gathering to data interpretation: AI can help process enormous amounts of information faster, surface context, and move more efficiently from insight to action. But the real value comes when AI amplifies human decision-making rather than replaces it. That means leaders should be focused not only on adoption, but on education, testing, and responsible use. AI can be an incredibly powerful teacher and tool, but it does not remove the need for human judgment, curiosity, or accountability. The companies that benefit most will be the ones that help their teams understand the “why” behind AI-driven outputs, critically evaluate information, and use the technology to make smarter, more informed decisions. That extends to how AI affects our own employees. As we automate more workflows, the way people work will change, and leaders have a responsibility to help their teams adjust. What becomes more important, not less, is domain expertise. The people who understand the business deeply are the ones best positioned to guide AI effectively, ask the right questions, and know when to trust the output and when to push back. The shift isn’t just technological, it’s organizational. Investing in your people’s ability to work alongside AI is just as critical as investing in the technology itself.
Sameer Gulati’s, President & Chief Product Officer of ZenBusiness: The most important reminder leaders need right now is that the workplace is made up of people, not technology. That may sound obvious, but it’s surprisingly easy to lose sight of in the current AI hype cycle. While leaders are understandably focused on AI strategy, productivity gains, and competitive advantage, many employees are experiencing something very different. They are feeling uncertain, anxious, and in some cases fearful about what AI means for their future. They’re reading headlines about layoffs attributed to AI, watching their jobs evolve in real time, seeing colleagues who embrace AI move faster than ever, and wondering what it all means for their own role and career. Many are also grappling with deeper questions around the ethics of AI, its societal impact, energy consumption, and our growing dependence on these tools. Whether those concerns are ultimately justified or not, they are real to the people experiencing them. The leaders who navigate this transition most successfully will be the ones who remember that AI adoption is not just a technology challenge, it is a human one. The companies that benefit most from AI won’t simply be those that deploy the newest tools. They’ll be the ones that help their people adapt, learn, and find confidence amid an extraordinary period of change. AI will continue to transform how work gets done. The goal isn’t to protect people from AI. The goal is to help people thrive alongside it.
Valerie Capers Workman, Chief Human Resources Officer of Empower Pharmacy: Leaders need to understand that AI costs more than people when the math is done honestly, and that AI-powered employees add more value than either AI alone or unaugmented humans. The full cost of enterprise AI runs forty to sixty percent higher than what most companies budget. The full value of a well-developed employee compounds across years of tenure in ways AI cannot replicate. The leaders who get this right will recognize three things. First, humans are not the Human in the Loop. Humans are the Last Mile in every decision AI informs. Emotional intelligence, domain expertise, critical thinking, and contextual judgment are the differentiators that determine whether an AI-augmented workforce delivers competitive advantage or technical debt. Second, the Chief Human Resources Officer required by this moment is the AI-fluent CHRO with the business acumen to evaluate AI deployments across every business unit and the credibility to participate in enterprise-wide capital allocation. Third, the companies winning this moment are investing in their people, and the financial outperformance is already in the public record.
Carol Juel, Chief Technology and Operating Officer of Synchrony: AI is most powerful when it’s paired with people, helping teams innovate faster and keeping human judgment at the center of every decision. That makes leadership critical, with the role of leaders is to help employees use AI to work better, faster, and smarter. Trust is the unlock. When employees trust their leaders, they’re more willing to embrace new AI tools and translate innovation into better customer outcomes. Our own data backs this up: 90% of our employees say they trust Synchrony to use AI fairly and ethically, and nearly 80% believe AI will have a positive impact on their careers, both well above industry benchmarks. Successful adoption of AI also requires investment. Over the next 5 years, we’re investing in key areas to increase speed, accuracy, and trust while elevating experiences for customers and merchants. In parallel, we’ve built our SynchronyGPT platform, AI field guides, and training sessions to make AI a practical daily skill. Managers reinforce this by measuring time saved, sharing wins, and coaching core human skills like critical thinking, curiosity, problem solving, and collaboration. We also collaborate with Great Place To Work on the AI For All Index to measure employee sentiment and guide responsible AI use. The results: generative AI tool adoption has reached 95% among exempt employees as of early 2026. And we expect leaders to use AI themselves. That’s how you develop a deep understanding of its strengths and weaknesses as well as the challenges that your employees might face. Nearly 100% of our senior leaders are using AI tools.
Sam Reese, CEO of Vistage: There’s no doubt that AI is impacting every part of every business right now, especially for its ability to drive meaningful productivity gains. One of the things I’m most excited about when it comes to AI is how it is leveling the playing field. Most of these AI tools are available to all – not just enterprise businesses – making it one of the greatest equalizers and opportunities for small and midsize businesses we’ve ever seen. The most forward-thinking CEOs are building processes that embed AI in how their teams work, rather than just experimenting with it on the side. They also understand that productivity won’t improve unless they train and develop their people. Culture and employee development remain key to whether AI drives a business forward. Organizations need the right people with the right skills to leverage the technology to its fullest.
Glenn Booth, CEO of Kiswe: The leaders who are going to win with AI are the ones who see it as a force multiplier. At Kiswe, we’re not asking how AI can replace our people. We’re asking how it can make them unstoppable. The same team, doing dramatically more. That’s the real opportunity.
Adi Bathla, founder and CEO of Revv: AI, at least when it comes to writing, tends to give you mediocre, middle-of-the-road, generic. We’ve all seen those LinkedIn posts or comments or blogs that you can just tell were written with AI and we think less of them because of it. That being said, in skilled, operational work, average is a real win. Take the auto industry as an example: if I can get a repair technician who’s six months into a repeatable, correct outcome, that’s enormous. If we can then crowdsource what the best team members know and disperse it to everybody, including those doing the work for the first time? Another major victory. The playing field is leveled and that matters because in my world (car safety), good enough is not enough. It’s binary: either you’re repairing the car properly or you’re not. So my advice is, one, don’t sell AI or buy it as magic. The more people treat AI as some magical black box, the less they actually adopt it and trust it. That’s irresponsible, and it backfires. Two, drop the instinct to buy the platform that “does everything.” That’s why so many pilots still stall, they solve nothing in particular or do a subpar job solving 11 problems. The software that sticks is low to no touch and kills one specific, painful, expensive problem. For our clients, that’s the research time nobody pays them for going from 60 minutes per vehicle to 2. The leaders who will succeed now, tomorrow, and five years from now will find the best tool to tackle a hair-on-fire problem, point the correct technology at it, and measure what comes back. Boring, embedded, and indispensable beats the impressive demo every time.
Ryan Rosett, founder and co-CEO of Credibly: The thing leaders keep getting wrong is treating AI as a cost-savings tool when the real question is what kind of growth it unlocks. At Credibly, we lend to small businesses, and I watch firsthand how technology either widens access or concentrates it. The same logic applies inside the workplace. If you deploy AI only to shrink headcount, you’ve answered the easy question and ignored the hard one. Dario Amodei made a point recently that stuck with me: the challenge in an AI economy isn’t incentivizing growth, it’s making sure everyone shares in it. Leaders have a narrow window to build their AI strategy around augmenting people rather than replacing them, and those who skip that step now will find it much harder to reverse later.
Andrew Duncan, CEO of QualityAI: Leaders need to understand that AI is already changing how work gets done. It is beginning to affect decisions, processes, roles, and expectations across the organisation, and that impact will only accelerate. The risk is that leaders either over-hype AI or underplay it. AI can create enormous value, but only if people trust the way it is being used. If the outputs are unreliable, if employees do not understand where AI fits into their work, or if governance is treated as an afterthought, adoption will be uneven, and the risks will grow quickly. Productivity is only part of the story. The more important question is whether AI is helping the organisation make better decisions and deliver better outcomes. That requires leaders to think beyond tools and pilots. They need to look at the quality of the data, how AI systems are tested, how risks are managed, and where human judgment still needs to sit. The workplace impact is deeply human. People want to know what AI means for their jobs, their skills, and their future. Leaders will not build confidence by avoiding those questions. They need to be honest about the change, practical about reskilling, and clear about how AI can help people do more valuable work. The organisations that benefit most from AI will be the ones that move with discipline. They will experiment, learn quickly, and put the right controls around the areas where risk is highest. That is where leaders need to focus now: creating the conditions for AI to be used confidently, responsibly, and at scale.
Jose Mejia, President and COO, RapidSOS: AI is not a replacement for people. It is a co-pilot for your best employees and the rhetoric on it serving as a means to reducing headcount misses the point entirely. Think about it this way: a pilot can land a plane alone, but the margin for error is thin. Add a co-pilot who reads every instrument and serves up the most critical data at exactly the right moment, and that pilot becomes far more effective. That is how leaders should think about AI. It does not replace the expert. It makes the expert better. What too many leaders miss is that AI is not a technology decision. It is a leadership and operational responsibility. It demands clearer priorities, stronger alignment, and the discipline to say no. AI amplifies everything: your strengths and your friction. If your teams are misaligned, AI will accelerate the problem, not solve it. I’ve seen multiple tech revolutions over the course of my career. What I’ve seen is that the organizations that win are the ones that invest in their people alongside their tools. If you consider your organization a human body, consider AI to be the training weight. Your people are the ones doing the lifting, building the muscle. Without the lifter, the weight is just metal. With the lifter, it becomes power.
Jeff Salter, founder and CEO of Caring Senior Service: AI adoption cannot be limited to a few early adopters. Leaders need to make sure their teams are trained on practical, everyday uses of AI and are given the freedom to experiment. Too often, people use new technology to do old work in slightly faster ways, but that misses the real opportunity. AI gives teams the ability to rethink how work should be done and imagine solutions they may never have considered before. When people across the organization understand what AI can do, they will uncover transformative ideas that leadership may never have discovered on its own.
Yali Saar, CEO of Tailor Brands: The thing most leaders are missing is that AI isn’t just helping them let go of their replaceable talent. It’s turning their best talent into founders. The tidal shift in new business creation isn’t just accelerated by companies letting people go; it’s people actively choosing to leave because they can suddenly do everything they couldn’t before. One person can now do what took a team of ten and a seed round. Build the product. Find the customers. Run the whole thing. Solo. No co-founder. No headcount. No investor’s permission. What was a fantasy five years ago is now just a Tuesday. And what is more important is recognizing that it’s not your weak performers you let go. It’s your best ones that leave. The operator who runs your hardest projects. The engineer who ships before the meeting ends. AI didn’t lower the floor; it removed the ceiling. At Tailor Brands, we saw this shift coming. We evolved the company from an AI design tool into a full business-building platform and one of the nation’s largest business formation hubs on one blunt bet: AI would gut traditional work, and the sharpest people wouldn’t update their résumés. They’d build. We sell them the tools to do it. The data’s already in. Last year, business formation stopped being seasonal for the first time ever. There’s no “right time to start” anymore. People build next to the 9-to-5, in real time. Side hustle and real company? Same thing now. Here’s what leaders won’t want to hear. Every retention lever you’ve got, be it title, equity, or the corner office, was built for a world where leaving meant joining someone else’s company. But that world is gone. Now, leaving means becoming your competition. Your sharpest people no longer need you. AI didn’t just threaten the job. It made the job optional for the exact people you can’t afford to lose. The company that eats your lunch is already being built. On your payroll. On your time. By the person you were about to promote.
Corey White, founder and CEO of Cyvatar: The most important thing to understand is that this is not a tool upgrade. It is a generational shift, on the scale of the typewriter to the computer. You can be the best typist alive, but that skill stops mattering the moment everyone else moves to a computer. And this is bigger than a productivity gain. It changes the economics of how work gets done, who can compete, and how fast a company can scale expertise. I am not sure every leader, or every employee, has fully absorbed that yet. So the real question for leaders is not which AI tools to buy. It is an operating-model question: What should a human do, and what should AI do? You have to go function by function and redesign how the work actually gets done. AI should be human-led and AI-assisted, with human judgment kept in front wherever it matters. That is a CEO-level conversation, not an IT project. And it is not about cutting people. It is about rethinking the design of the work itself. Here is the difference in practice. A competitor that has rebuilt around AI can automatically pull and correlate data from dozens of sources and generate a report in minutes. The other company has a person doing that analysis manually and building a PowerPoint from a template. Same job, very different speed, cost, and quality. Over time, manual processes do not compete with AI-assisted ones. Not because people disappear, but because an AI-assisted person outperforms one working alone. We rebuilt Cyvatar around AI over the past year, so I am watching this play out firsthand. People also get hung up on the fact that AI makes mistakes. It will, especially in something like cybersecurity. But when it does, you can usually put a control, validation step, or automation around that failure so the same class of mistake becomes far less likely going forward. Unlike a lesson learned by a single employee, that improvement can be applied instantly and consistently across the entire organization. It is not magic, and it still requires human oversight, but it compounds in a way manual processes never have. That is also how you solve a problem every business owner knows. When an employee leaves, knowledge often walks out the door with them, and the company starts over. AI gives organizations the ability to capture, document, and operationalize expertise so it becomes part of the business instead of living in one person’s head. The way I see it, the progression is straightforward: AI is a generational shift. That means leaders must redesign how work gets done. Organizations that become AI-assisted will outperform those that remain largely manual. As they do, AI becomes a mechanism for preserving and scaling organizational knowledge. The leaders who win will be the ones who learn how to orchestrate humans and AI together, using each where they create the most value. So the job for leaders is to redesign the work, keep human judgment where it counts, and help their people learn to lead AI rather than fear it. AI is not the enemy. The lack of knowledge is the enemy.
Frequently Asked Questions
How will AI affect the workforce?
AI will affect the workforce by changing tasks, roles, skills, and expectations. Some work will become faster, some work will become more automated, and some jobs will require people to use AI as part of how they make decisions or deliver results. Leaders need to understand the human side of that change because employees will be looking for clarity about what AI means for their work and their future.
What should leaders tell employees about AI?
Leaders should tell employees how AI is being used, where it fits into the business, what the company expects from employees, and where human judgment remains essential. People do not need vague reassurance. They need honest communication, practical training, and a clear explanation of how AI can help them do better work while the company manages risk responsibly.
What skills will matter most as AI changes work?
As AI changes work, the most important skills will include judgment, critical thinking, domain expertise, curiosity, communication, problem-solving, and the ability to check AI outputs. Technical skills will matter in some roles, but many employees will need to learn how to ask better questions, evaluate answers, apply context, and use AI without outsourcing their own thinking.
How can leaders keep human judgment central as AI becomes more common?
Leaders can keep human judgment central by being clear about which decisions need human review, who owns the outcome, and how AI outputs should be checked. AI can move quickly, but speed does not remove responsibility. In high-stakes work, people still need to understand the context, assess the risk, and decide whether an answer holds up.
How should leaders think about AI and jobs?
Leaders should think about AI and jobs with honesty and discipline. AI will change work, and some tasks or roles may change significantly. At the same time, employees who learn to use AI well can become more valuable because they can move faster, make better use of information, and focus more of their time on judgment, relationships, creativity, and problem-solving.
