HR Asks AI: What's a Job Anymore?

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From Day One Editors
October 23, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 19 minutes

The rapid maturity of AI is changing the question HR leaders ask when they’re talking about jobs. Where leaders once asked, “Who can do this job?,” they’re now asking, “What combination of human and AI can do it best?”

This is a natural next revolution of the “skills-based hiring” model that shifted job paradigms away from role descriptions and toward equipping workers with specific capabilities the organization needs. And that goes for AI agents too. One of AI assistant Claude’s new features is actually called “skills.”

Headlines make it sound like AI is wiping out jobs by the thousand, but “there’s a lot more at play there,” Lisa Highfield, the principal director of HR tech and AI at the consulting firm McLean & Company, told From Day One contributing editor Emily McCrary-Ruiz Esparza. Some companies are going through typical reorganizations while others are simply responding to market downturns. “We’re not seeing the masses of AI job reduction that a lot of these headlines sometimes indicate.”

While displacement is not yet widespread, companies are experimenting with augmenting workers–and sometimes replacing them, yes–with AI. Startups like Artisan and Viven are building “AI coworkers” and “digital twins,” and attracting tens of millions of dollars in venture funding. Yet few are forecasting human irrelevance. 

Even Artisan CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, whose company is probably best known for its provocative “Stop Hiring Humans” marketing campaign, told TechCrunch that he doesn’t believe AI will replace most human labor. “Human labor becomes more valuable when you have the AI content,” he said. In fact, the company has been hiring all year. It’s more likely that we will see more human-AI partnership in the workplace.

How far up the ladder could this go? Hanneke Faber, CEO of global tech manufacturing company Logitech, says that she would entertain the idea of an AI agent joining her board of directors. “We already use [AI agents] in almost every meeting,” Faber told the audience last week at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women conference. “As they evolve—and some of the best agents or assistants that we’ve built actually do things themselves—that comes with a whole bunch of governance things. You have to keep in mind and make sure you really want that bot to take action. But if you don’t have an AI agent in every meeting, you’re missing out on some of the productivity.”

Many leaders are putting faith in AI as a productivity booster. A leaked message from a Meta executive told workers that they should be working five times faster, thanks to AI. Even companies just dabbling in automation are using AI to handle repetitive tasks like data entry and reporting, while augmenting others, like analysis and strategy. 

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Employees are reporting time savings. At HR tech company Deputy, employees using AI tools report saving five to ten hours per week. At media company Scripps, 20% of newsroom workers using AI for just one or two hours per day say they save roughly 20 minutes of total work time.

Nascent AI practices are not without their problems, of course. Employees are frustrated by the amount of “workslop,” or AI-generated content void of substance, being served up, forcing humans to clean up after the machines. It’s become so common that colleagues are reportedly losing trust in each other. “We think [AI] will reduce our workload,” said Sue Cantrell, a work futurist at Deloitte. “But in reality, many workers are finding it increases their workload. It can also increase feelings of loneliness when they’re working more with AI than with their colleagues.”

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