What does AI mean for the work of my skilled staff?

The short answer

What does AI mean for the work of my skilled staff?

AI changes the work of your skilled staff mostly from the inside: their role stays, their tasks shift. The ordinary case more and more often runs by itself, and the expert keeps the exception: the moment something is off and judgment is needed.

That is good news, with two caveats. Some work does disappear, and that conversation is better held early than late. And your juniors will no longer learn their trade by themselves.

The numbers

Will AI lead to layoffs?

So far AI has led to few layoffs in most businesses. Executives say so themselves, in a large international survey.

The NBER, the American National Bureau of Economic Research, published a survey this year of almost six thousand executives in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia. The great majority see no effect of AI yet on the number of people they employ, and for the next three years they expect little net change.

There is also a gloomier voice. According to Axios, Dario Amodei, the CEO of AI builder Anthropic, warned in 2025 that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level office jobs. That is a forecast from an interested party, but entry-level work does deserve your attention.

My reading

What changes in an expert’s day?

An expert’s day shifts from doing to overseeing. Whoever carries out the work now will coordinate what gets carried out, and whoever makes something now will judge what has been made.

Hardly anyone gets fired, and nobody’s day stays the same.Paul Hoffman

In my book De Informatiemotor I use the planner as an example. His morning now starts with a round of the phone and the planning board: which order is in, which machine is free. Give that schedule to a digital employee and the morning round disappears; the planner then reviews what his digital employee proposes, and says yes, no or something else.

The hours that free up go to the work no schedule can solve: the rush order, the machine that stops, two customers who want their date at the same time. “That is how his craft moves from the schedule to the judgment beneath it.” In the book the project manager goes the same way: the ordinary case runs by itself, and his experience lies in the moment it breaks.

The honest story

So which work does shrink?

The work that shrinks is the passing-on work: collecting information, retyping it, sending it around and chasing answers. Whoever fills their day mostly with that notices AI first.

In the book I put it like this: “Pure passing-on shrinks: the collecting, retyping and forwarding, the chasing of an answer. What takes judgment, a decision or a relationship does not shrink.” If a digital employee takes over almost all the work of such a role, and demand for that work does not grow with it, fewer people are needed.

Do not tell that colleague that nothing will change, nor that he is redundant. Whoever has carried information through your business for years knows the chain better than anyone, and often becomes one of your best builders.

But the transition takes time, and not everyone wants to or can go that way. That is why you hold that conversation early.

The risk

Where will tomorrow’s experts learn their trade?

Tomorrow’s experts will no longer learn their trade by themselves. AI takes over first the simple work a junior used to start with, and with it the bottom rung of the training ground disappears.

A junior learned the trade by doing the simple work a thousand times, under the eye of someone who could do it. If that work falls away, your business will be without new experts in ten years. That training ground always came about by itself. From now on you design it yourself.

That can be very practical. Let a junior still do part of the work by hand, so he learns what good looks like, and let him look for the digital employee’s mistakes. A senior does one job from start to finish himself a few times a year, without AI, so his own standard stays sharp.

Whether that is enough, nobody knows yet, and the book leaves that question open.

In practice

What do you do with this this week?

This week, take the list of your people and note after each name how much of their week is passing-on work. That is the work that changes first, and that is where the conversation starts.

Next to it, note who in your business still does the simple work to learn the trade. That is where you design the training ground. And write down who carries the knowledge your business runs on, because you capture that knowledge while he is still there.

Want to know where the passing-on work sits in your business, and what a digital employee could take over there? We map that with the BORS scan. Where your business stands now, you can read in the article on the five levels of AI.