- AI is developing at warp speed, creating tension for workers trying to understand how to best integrate the technology into their daily work.
- The experience gap is widening. As AI replaces many entry-level tasks, we need deliberate strategies to enable learning opportunities, mentorship, and informal collaboration.
- AI’s benefits are for sharing. Across the workplace, leaders must rethink ways to reward humans for the productivity gains AI delivers.
It’s a fascinating time to be in HR. It’s also a time of tension, as AI and its capabilities develop at seemingly warp speed.
Just last year, many of us were comparing the capabilities of AI to an intern on the team. Now, with agentic AI, we’ve evolved to the point that we’re talking about everyone having their own chief of staff. And already, six in 10 workers consider AI a part of their team.
I thought it was fitting that the dominant theme that surfaced in Deloitte’s “2025 Global Human Capital Trends” report was the importance of navigating complex tensions and choices in the worker-organization relationship. For example, the report surfaces that two-thirds of workers globally are overwhelmed by how quickly work is changing, and 49% are worried that the pace of change will leave them behind.
It’s a lot to digest, so recently, Sue Cantrell, Human Capital Eminence Leader and Vice President — Products, Workforce Strategies with Deloitte Consulting, LLP, joined me to talk about the report and the need for HR to evolve as agentic AI becomes standard in workplaces everywhere.
She pointed out that when her team was writing the report, the global outlook felt more stable than today.
“There is no doubt that we are in an uncertain environment,” Cantrell said. “Technologically and sociologically, we have a lot going on. It has only increased and elevated, and it’s making our world even more difficult to navigate.”
One common theme surfaced among the 13,000 survey respondents across 93 countries — it’s never been more difficult to do this work.
While it can be tempting to navigate times of uncertainty by slowing your decision-making, Cantrell and I agreed that is not the answer in this rapidly evolving, AI-powered world. She pointed out that businesses need “stagility” right now, an environment that balances business leaders’ quest for dynamic, agile organizations with workers’ need for a stable foundation.
In these challenging times, when the only thing certain about the future is its uncertainty, I hope I can offer some insights that can guide you — or even ground you.
Here are the four top takeaways from our discussion.
Here, Cantrell and I discuss how technology changes on-the-job skills for the better.
Mind the experience gap
With AI taking over foundational, early-level tasks, many people in their early careers are challenged by a rapidly changing environment for on-the-job learning. Paradoxically, at the same time, employers are demanding more experience from their entry-level hires.
For HR teams, it’s important to evaluate how AI is impacting a workplace and contributing to these experience gaps.
For example, technology has shown us that it has the potential to negatively reshape our critical thinking and memory skills.
Any person of a certain age can tell you that they remember their home phone number and a handful of other phone numbers from their childhood. Today, they may not know any number beside their own because they don’t need to memorize such things.
In some offices, specific initiatives are helping to bridge the experience gap by enabling strategic collaboration and informal collegial learning.
“When people are really good at things, what they end up doing is helping other people as opposed to working on their own projects,” Dr. Sarah Bana, an assistant professor at Chapman University, said in a recent New York Times article on how AI may influence layoffs.
These are relationships and skills that are well worth preserving.
Cantrell talks about the importance of giving employees the opportunity to experiment with AI to build agility in the workforce.
The era of convergence
We’ve already cycled through a number of phases in the brief history of AI. Early on, automation was the main capability. Then, folks were talking about augmentation and using AI to extend one’s abilities. Now, we tend to frame AI in a human-and-machine collaboration paradigm.
The next era of AI we’re entering looks to be convergence, to borrow Cantrell’s term. Like a centaur or cyborg, AI is becoming so interwoven in our daily work it’s difficult to distinguish where our work ends and the tech tasks begin.
“Obviously, technology is becoming more human with more human interfaces,” Cantrell said. “We can code with natural language today. We have gestures and natural language interfaces. Technology can detect emotion and infer motivations. We’ve got the rise of humanoid robotics that increasingly resemble and mimic humans. And with agentic AI, we have AI agents that can act on our behalf.”
She makes a great point, and the current environment makes me think back to the days of digital transformation, when we were all talking about how every company, regardless of industry, was becoming a tech company.
Now, with these tools and this technology, every person is becoming a tech-enabled worker. In other words, we’re all tech companies and we’re all tech talent.
As AI unlocks opportunities, we must catch up
Throughout history, there were countless things that humans dreamed of doing, but the technology wasn’t there yet. Now, the technology is moving so fast we need to catch up.
That’s creating another one of those tensions we’re talking about: how can we develop the right strategies, the right applications, the right governance, and do it all fast enough to stay ahead of the technology as it evolves exponentially?
In HR, specifically, we’re seeing loads of potential when it comes to agentic AI.
“Not only can agents automate tasks, they can actually get involved and execute tasks,” Cantrell said. “AI can create and execute multistep plans to achieve outcomes. It’s dynamic. It can give humans new information to make decisions based on AI suggestions. It has memory.”
As HR teams adapt to the evolving technology, they’ll need to rebalance who does work based on skills and who does it based on AI.
At the same time, the speed of adoption will depend largely on the mindset and pace of the organization at hand.
The Deloitte survey found that over 70% of managers and workers say they’re more likely to join and stay with an organization if it updates its employee value proposition to help them thrive in an AI-driven world.
Business leaders, whether they’re CIOs, CEOs or CHROs, must understand that AI adoption is so much more than technology implementation or an initiative. It demands an evolution in culture and leadership, because this really is a new way of work.
AI rewards are for sharing
In his recent keynote at Cultivate, Eightfold Co-CEO and Co-founder Ashutosh Garg said the age of agentic AI is replenishing a scarce commodity: time. Because agentic AI can work with greater autonomy, learn as it goes, make decisions, and also tackle multiple tasks simultaneously, it creates greater scale at a greater rate.
That means there’s tremendous opportunity to give back time, both to the individual and to the organization.
The question is, will organizations allow people to share the rewards inherent in this time saved?
Cantrell pondered whether enterprises could give workers a four-day work week, or offer financial incentives for adhering to protocols suggested by AI. Why should workers buy into the benefits AI offers an organization if they themselves reap none of those benefits?
That brings us to the question of performance reviews, something that’s been keeping me up at night. If we’re cyborgs dependent on machine-human collaboration, will our performance be measured based on the human component alone, or the overall output enabled by the machine collaboration, or some other metric?
It’s all multilayered and complex, and it’s something we’ll need to think long and hard about in the not-so-distant future.
In times of tension, there’s opportunities for rebalance and growth. And while the pace of change can feel overwhelming right now, it’s essential that organizations start somewhere.
More than ever, I believe the line between IT and HR will fade, and CIOs and CHROs will join forces to determine when, where and how to automate, augment, and bring on agents.
Taking action is essential, even if the steps are small and measured, because as the very fabric of work evolves, standing still is not a strategy.
Watch the full webinar, “When AI joins the team: Rethinking what your workforce needs to thrive,” available on demand.
Jason Cerrato is Vice President, Talent-centered Transformation for Eightfold, focused on the capabilities of our comprehensive Talent Intelligence Platform and the future of work. Prior to Eightfold, he was with Gartner as a Senior Research Director, focusing on HR technology and transformation. Jason also co-hosts The New Talent Code podcast, which provides insights and open discussion with industry leaders on all things talent and HR tech.
As used in this document, “Deloitte” means Deloitte Consulting LLP, a subsidiary of Deloitte LLP. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of our legal structure. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting.