Navigating the Process of Integrating AI in the Workplace: Evolving Roles
A Call to Shift Our Process of Defining and Redefining Roles
"Although it is true that millions of jobs are going to be lost and millions of jobs are going to be created, the augmentation side is the transformation side." - Gilbert Fossoun Houngbo at Davos 2024
Virtually every leader is currently asking themselves: how can we navigate through this complex process of integrating AI into our ways of working to leverage its value-adding potential?
As AI continues to reshape our work environments, the challenge isn’t just about adopting new technologies; it’s about rethinking how we design roles, manage change, and navigate uncertainty in this fast-evolving landscape.
Redesigning the Process of Defining Roles
Arguably, one of the primary shifts as AI enables automation of existing roles and responsibilities is in our process of defining and redefining roles.
The pace at which AI is transforming industries means that traditional methods of managing roles, designing workflows, and achieving alignment are becoming increasingly obsolete.
The question becomes: How can we shift our approach to keep pace with the dynamic capabilities AI introduces?
Key Questions for Leaders
As we embark on this journey, here are a few key questions to consider:
How do we set the right goals for leveraging AI when the opportunities are evolving so rapidly?
How do we effectively manage the risks that come with AI integration?
What does our process for selecting and testing new tools look like, and how do we ensure they align with our strategic objectives?
How do we identify and fill emerging roles in our teams as AI evolves?
These questions underscore the fundamental premise: We need a shift in how we think about and design roles in the workplace—roles that are adaptable, forward-thinking, and capable of evolving in response to AI and other technological advances.
A Framework for Understanding Roles
To help us navigate this shift, let’s explore a framework for understanding roles in the age of AI. Here we’ll propose four levels of roles, each representing a fundamental shift in our capacity for effectively managing complexity and change:
As you read through the following descriptions of each level, reflect on the patterns you observe in your own organization and stakeholder systems. How are roles defined in your world?
1. Functional Static Roles
At the most basic level, we have functional static roles. These are rigid, traditionally defined roles with clear job descriptions, fixed tasks, and specific responsibilities. Updating roles at this level is often a top-down, resource-intensive process, and the rigid nature of these roles can create inefficiencies when rapid change is required.
In today’s fast-moving world, these rigid roles are increasingly misaligned with the rapidly changing needs of organizations, resulting in missed opportunities and a lack of agility. To remain competitive, organizations must move beyond this static approach and rethink how roles are designed and evolved.
2. Functional Dynamic Roles
Next, we have functional dynamic roles. These roles are more flexible, often skill-based, allowing individuals to respond more effectively to shifting needs. AI increasingly facilitates this process by using tools like talent marketplaces or skills databases to match individuals with tasks or projects based on their current skillsets.
While this level offers more agility, roles are still determined functionally: based on what people can do more than who they are. Getting stuck on this functional level limits our capacity to tap into deeper sources of purpose, energy, meaning and motivation—fundamental to our capacity to effectively manage complexity and change. Arguably, this will be an increasingly critical step forward into future human roles as AI takes over more and more functions on lower levels of complexity.
3. Self-Actualizing Roles
At the third level, we step into self-actualizing roles. These roles are designed not only to address functional needs but also to promote inner personal growth and development. The goal is to cultivate greater self-management capacity, personal agency, and intrinsic motivation.
Self-actualizing roles are largely defined by individuals reflecting on their personal values, strengths, and goals, enabling them to decide how to contribute to the organization in ways that align with their unique potential. While many organizations aspire to offer this level of autonomy, achieving it is often difficult.
The pattern that emerges is what we call ineffective autonomy: people following their own internal compasses in different directions, causing collaboration issues and inefficiencies. The result is often a collapse back into lower levels where leaders have more control (at the expense of capacity for managing higher levels of complexity and change). How do we prevent this collapse to keep evolving this capacity as the context of our work becomes more complex?
Such a lack of strategic alignment, when colored by the context of emerging AI technology, takes on weight. How well do we understand how this context is changing and reshaping our roles on every level: as a market within an ecosystem, an industry within a market, an organization within an industry, a team within an organization, and as individuals within a team?
This transforming context is creating an unprecedented imperative for us to level up our thinking around establishing and developing into such roles. No longer can we afford to remain in reactive states, stuck in slow-evolving, top-down systems that lack the agility needed to navigate such rapid change.
How can organizations maintain alignment while offering autonomy? This is a critical question as AI introduces new opportunities for self-direction augmented by technology.
4. Self-and-Systems Actualizing Roles
The fourth and final level is self-and-systems actualizing roles. These roles are about reconciling the challenges of the previous levels—balancing individual autonomy with shared strategic direction, and aligning personal growth with systemic evolution.
This level is enabled by ways of working that facilitate an ever-deepening understanding of both ourselves as individuals, as well as the changing systemic context of our lives and our work. What is the context of this specific place in space and time calling for us to uniquely contribute as individuals, teams, organizations, industries, communities, etc.?
This, of course, is no easy question. The answer is not an answer, but rather an ongoing practice and process of reflection and insight. The direction of our work, fine-tuned by an ever-deepening understanding of self and systems, must be continuously regenerated through this practice.
The primary instrument for evolving this understanding is developmental dialogue. Developmental dialogue is enabled by developmental leadership. It consists of designing containers for exploring how we are being called to evolve our roles across nested systems: individuals within teams, teams within the organization, the organization within the industry, the industry within markets, and so on.
Roles are continuously defined and redefined through this ongoing practice and process, working to simultaneously develop ourselves (inner work) and the living systems we serve (outer work).
The Imperative for Evolving Roles in the Age of AI
As AI continues to advance, the need to redesign roles becomes more urgent. The roles of today are not the same as those of yesterday, and the roles of tomorrow are unclear. To keep up with this change, we must redesign not just the roles themselves, but the very process of how we establish and redefine roles within our organizations.
Embedded in this process are some very fundamental questions we will need to dance with as AI capabilities evolve. What does it mean to be human? What do we have to uniquely offer? What potential do we have that we have not yet seen, much less developed?
Again, the answer is not an answer. It is an ongoing practice and process.
Moving Forward: What is Required of You?
As a leader, the question you must ask yourself is: How can I grow into the role of supporting this continuous coevolutionary process? It’s not just about adopting AI tools; it’s about embracing a mindset of ongoing reflection, development, and adaptation.
The journey of integrating AI into the workplace is ongoing—a process that requires agility, self-awareness, and a commitment to developing into emerging roles that enable us to continue to contribute unique value for our stakeholders.
Looking to dig in deeper? Check out A Brief Introduction to Developmental Leadership.