Understand a job before you eliminate it—a guide to redesigning work in the age of AI

Ford recently hired around 350 engineers who were previously involved in manual tasks to address issues with the company's automated quality systems and artificial intelligence inspection tools. This occurred because Ford believed that integrating AI would automatically result in high-quality products, which proved to be incorrect.

Similarly, Klarna discovered that its AI assistant took on the responsibilities of 700 customer service agents, leading to a decision to rehire human agents. A survey revealed that 39% of companies with AI implementation experienced layoffs, and 55% of these organizations made incorrect decisions regarding the redundancies they made.

It is worth noting that companies that cut jobs due to AI are likely to reincorporate these roles in the future.

The author argues that job cuts resulting from AI implementation are primarily due to a lack of understanding of the roles and their true purpose. Often, companies eliminate jobs without considering the reasons behind their existence, leading to unintended consequences. To avoid such issues, the author suggests a five-step process to redesign work in the age of AI.

This process involves describing the goals of a role, identifying which goals can be achieved more effectively by humans or machines, breaking down the remaining tasks, choosing a lens for redesign, and finally recombining the human and machine-based tasks into new roles.