How do you spend your workday? If your value to the organization is to process paperwork, take an order and fulfill it, manage data and people’s access to it, report out a status, regurgitate templated or documented information, or have the same conversations over and over, I can confirm some hard news that you may already suspect: You’ll be replaced by AI — and soon.
It’s not really your fault, either. Your job description isn’t usually the result of a “choose your own major” scenario. Your organization created a lot of paperwork to process and needed a processor. You did the job as outlined in the job description that the org created. And the more paper, orders, numbers, and status reports that were produced, the busier you got, the more time you spent processing those things, and the more that task became your whole job, whole role, and whole value as an employee.
Now that AI, and especially agentic AI, can take on more of that paper processing, the same leaders who wrote that job description and put you in that role are hunting through the organization for the low-hanging fruit for easy replacement. HR, this affects a lot of you specifically.
An announcement this week gives us a rich example of how AI can help leaders rebalance their workforce but also showcases how vulnerable support functions are to being replaced by AI. In The Wall Street Journal, IBM announced its move to AI agents to “replace the work of a couple hundred human resources workers.” This job-shrinking in HR made space for job adds in areas that “[International Business Machines Chief Executive Arvind] Krishna calls ‘critical thinking’ focused domains, where people need to do things that ‘face up or against other humans, as opposed to just doing rote process work.’” To IBM, those areas of opportunity include sales, marketing, and software engineering. But IBM HR could also benefit from streamlining and efficiencies by leveraging AI to improve skills detection, learning, workforce planning, recruiting, inclusion, resource management, career-pathing, and the myriad other AI use cases within HR.
This opportunity is also why I offer the same warning to any employee: Make sure that your value is more than just your time and ability to process paper, forms, and orders. If it’s not, make moves to demonstrate your (human) capabilities, build your artificial intelligence quotient (AIQ), and prepare for change.
I see a huge opportunity for HR to guide their organizations through AI transformation — something I hope IBM also sees — but HR leaders must rise to the occasion and demonstrate why they deserve to be part of AI governance and use case selection, not the next group packing up their boxes.
