As AI rapidly transforms workplaces, employees are on edge.

Roughly two years after ChatGPT's release sparked widespread interest in generative AI, it's becoming clear that most workers' jobs will fundamentally change — and some may disappear. An analysis by the International Monetary Fund published in January forecast that artificial intelligence would affect nearly 40% of jobs.

But the impact of AI on employment is complex and far-reaching. Some roles may become obsolete; others may be augmented or even created by AI. Workers are simultaneously experiencing anxiety, doubt, and excitement. What new skills will I need to develop? How can I stay relevant? And importantly, is my organization prepared for this AI-driven future?

Whether employees can trust their organization's leaders to navigate these opportunities is a pivotal question, said Brian Solis, the head of global innovation at ServiceNow, a cloud-based automation platform, and author of the book "Mindshift: Transform Leadership, Drive Innovation, and Reshape the Future." He said that while many executives recognize AI's promise in increasing efficiency by automating repetitive tasks, they often fail to grasp the technology's profound potential.

"Leaders talk about the new normal or the next normal, but then they natively snap back to business as usual," Solis said. "It's the leaders who explore and ask: 'What if? Who will unlock entirely new ways of working?'"

Workers themselves have a responsibility to learn and grow, he added. They need to experiment with new technologies both in and outside work and challenge themselves to push beyond their comfort zones. "You need to literally rewire your brain," he said. "If you're waiting for someone to tell you what to do, you're on the wrong side of innovation."

'Workers need to be proactive'

Despite the breathless headlines about AI changing everything about the way we work, the reality is more mundane.

In a quarterly Gallup survey of American workers conducted in May, seven in 10 respondents said they never used AI in their jobs, and only one in 10 said they used it regularly. The survey used a random sample of 21,543 working adults. Among those who said they did use AI, the most common applications included generating ideas, consolidating information, and automating basic tasks.

Still, investment in AI continues to surge. A report from IDC predicted that global spending would reach $632 billion by 2028, more than double what it is now, covering AI apps, infrastructure, and related services.

Companies are investing in AI to avoid falling behind, said Mansour Javidan, an expert in digital transformation and the executive director of the Najafi Global Mindset Institute at Arizona State's Thunderbird School of Global Management. "There's a lot of hype driven by board expectations, and that's led to a herd mentality to move quickly," he said. "No CEO is going to look bad by investing in AI right now."

Workers, meanwhile, are caught between uncertainty and anticipation. "There's a disconnect," Javidan said. "At the highest levels of the organization, there's a lot of excitement about AI. But among lower- and midlevel employees, there's a good deal of anxiety and ambiguity because there's no clear path."

But "workers mustn't rely on senior executives and hope things will turn out rosy," he said.

Javidan advises employees to seize development opportunities within their organizations and seek out online courses. Many top universities, including MIT and Stanford, provide free classes and workshops to help people build their skills. Grassroots and community-based learning groups, such as Women Defining AI, can be valuable resources.

"Workers need to be proactive and educate themselves," he said.

AI as a strategic collaborator

Beyond formal training and coursework, getting comfortable with AI requires a fundamental mindset shift, experts say.

"We were born with skills like curiosity, wonder, and imagination, but we often unlearned these in schools," Solis said. "The aim with AI should not be to generate expected answers or reinforce existing thinking but to challenge our conventions."

Solis said he uses AI as a tool for perspective taking, asking it to generate responses from the personas of the Apple founder Steve Jobs and Walt Disney. This approach helps him identify blind spots, explore alternative viewpoints, and seek inspiration. "They're my personal coaches," he said.

Molly Sands, the head of the teamwork lab at the software company Atlassian, which studies teamwork in the age of AI and distributed work, recommends viewing AI as a creative partner, not just a task-completion machine. "The people who are saving the most time and seeing the biggest benefits are those who see AI as a strategic collaborator," she said.

This involves engaging with AI through dynamic, iterative conversations — much like working with a team of experts, she said. A new study by researchers at the MIT Sloan School of Management backed this up, finding that human-AI teams showed the most promise in creative tasks like generating content and imagery and translating software code.

"A lot of people use it for one or two use cases, but the growth we're going to see in the next year or two is the people who think about it more ubiquitously," Sands said. "Agents will be a key driver of this."

Her team at Atlassian, for example, has developed a custom agent designed to help employees write more clearly. Essentially, she said, workers "word-vomit" into the agent with information about their audience, context, and key details. The agent then offers up a tailored draft in the worker's voice.

"Our workdays are consumed by writing emails, creating slide decks, and other routine tasks," Sands said. "If AI can take on some of this load — freeing us up for creative thinking and solving meaty problems — the better off we'll be."

The value of soft skills

Learning how to work with AI is imperative for most workers, but it's important to recognize that human skills remain essential.

After all, said Hakan Ozcelik, a professor of management at California State University, Sacramento, the value of human workers lies in their cognitive, behavioral, and emotional abilities. "There are all sorts of skills that AI doesn't have yet, and maybe never will," he said.

"Humans are inherently social beings, constantly interacting with customers, colleagues, competitors, and their physical environment," Ozcelik said. "These interpersonal skills are invaluable assets for any organization."

While AI can process information and perform repetitive functions with speed and accuracy, it lacks the soft skills necessary for effective communication and strategic decision-making. A report by Cornerstone, a skills-development platform, said that while generative-AI-related job postings had risen 411% since 2023, the demand for soft skills such as leadership, communication, and emotional intelligence outpaced digital skills by 2.4 times in North America and 2.9 times in Europe.

This is why Ozcelik advises employees to embark on what he calls "a process of professional soul-searching." Closely analyze your daily activities to determine your unique contributions and core competencies that cannot be outsourced, he said: "Dissect your work and look at what you offer your organization in a given day or a week."

Also, identify areas where AI could offer assistance. For example, teachers may realize that while AI can handle grading for grammar and syntax, they should focus on evaluating students' ideas and nurturing creativity. Similarly, healthcare professionals can leverage AI for administrative tasks or data analysis while dedicating more quality time to patients.

In an AI-driven world, the need for human skills will not change; instead, these skills will become even more vital as workers learn to collaborate effectively with technology, Ozcelik said.

"It's about what you contribute and the value you bring," he said.

• The office — and the role it plays in companies — is at the center of workforce change.
• Neil Murray, a Workforce Innovation board member, discussed workspace purpose, leadership, and AI.
• This article is part of "Workforce Innovation," a series exploring the forces shaping enterprise transformation.

Commercial real estate has experienced a tumultuous few years, with pandemic-related office vacancies and high interest rates. The sector is also at the epicenter of significant changes to the global workforce.

"It is the most incredible time to work in this industry," said Neil Murray, the CEO of Work Dynamics at JLL. "We are at the center of some really important strategic conversations about the very nature of work."

Work Dynamics is a division of the global real-estate corporation that collaborates with corporate clients on technology, employee experience, and design strategies. Murray says its goals are to help client companies attract and retain employees and foster productivity.

In its annual global Future of Work survey, which involved 2,300 corporate real-estate and business decision-makers, some 64% of respondents said they expected to increase their head counts by 2030.

JLL's third-quarter earnings beat estimates — it reported revenue of $5.87 billion, an increase of 15% from the same period in 2023.

Murray talked about companies mulling the purpose of the office, how leaders can incentivize employees to willingly go into their workplaces, and how to harness AI for concrete breakthroughs.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

How have the priorities of your clients changed in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the changes that brought to office life?

What we do for a living changed dramatically through the pandemic. Previously, corporate real estate may have been seen as a sort of factor of production. We weren't intentional about why we had space and where we had it, what we wanted that space to do, and its function. Is it a cost line, or is it an investment?

Suddenly every chief executive in the world had a view on real estate. It brought much more intentionality about its function within the organization and its ability to contribute to broader organizational goals.

Our business now is about helping our clients navigate that complex situation where they're planning to grow their workforce over a number of years, balancing what that might look like in the macro environment we're living in. It's a very complex environment for leaders to think through.

What's the state of return-to-office you're seeing among your clients?

There's a fairly even split between companies that are embracing some sort of hybrid policy and those that want their people back full time.

In our Future of Work survey, we found that 85% of organizations had a policy of at least three days of office attendance per week, and 43% expected the number of days in the office to increase by 2030.

It's still very much an evolving scenario. The metrics of productivity that we've relied upon to make database decisions don't always capture the challenges that businesses are facing. The time people spend doing emails or logged in doesn't necessarily translate to productivity.

One client, for example, has found that while their productivity metrics looked just fine, the number of patents had fallen off a cliff from prepandemic levels.

That led to this notion that what we're missing is, as the phrase goes, people painting on the same canvas at the same time.

Now we've seen some high-profile companies coming out, wanting more time spent in the office, saying there's something lost around culture and the collective sort of personality and purpose of an organization because of remote working. Companies are finding it really difficult to balance that.

What aspects of the workplace are most effective for enticing workers to return to the office?

The overwhelming evidence is that it's not a single amenity but it's other people — and, in particular, leaders. Companies that are intentional about their leaders being present have seen the greatest results in terms of people coming back.

What people crave is proximity to leadership for personal development. So without getting leaders back into the office, you can add whatever amenities you want and you'll still have significant challenges.

Clients that enacted three-days-a-week mandates but didn't focus on leadership presence have exactly the same attendance as those who didn't have three-day mandates.

Could that be attributed to people just wanting to be visible when the boss is around?

I wouldn't purport to understand entirely the psychology of humans, but I do believe that our research and my own experience is that people enjoy other people. The most important amenity in any workplace is that notion of community and other folks to chat to.

The notion of apprenticeship in all aspects of what we do is very real. The ability to learn from others, to absorb how things are done or navigate the complexities of an organization, is really difficult to do among 30-minute slots. You don't get to sort of naturally observe through osmosis what's happening in the world around you.

You mentioned in one of our roundtables that companies need to focus on consistent, breakthrough innovation across the organization as opposed to incremental innovation from a centralized department or team. Why is that important, and how can leaders work toward that goal?

When you centralize innovation, you can get stuck in the paradigm of trying to incrementally improve a particular way of working. But the technology breakthroughs mean that it's fundamentally shifting how we do business.

In my business alone, the rapid adoption of AI tools in daily business use has surprised us all. We are an organization with 250 years of data on everything from how buildings are occupied and used to what they cost to run to their utilities to their capital values.

The tools available to us now to cut and splice and curate and make connections in that data, which we were never able to make before at scale, are driving us to think about the business in completely different ways.

Breakthrough innovation comes about when you use a large language model to interpret multiple data sets and then you start to ask the second, third, and fourth questions, going deeper and deeper into a particular topic. You find things that you could not have possibly seen or connected otherwise.

This article is part of "Workforce Innovation," a series exploring the forces shaping enterprise transformation.

When Wex, a payments platform based in Portland, Maine, set an ambitious goal to double its revenue, to $5 billion, within five years, it recognized that achieving this would require changes in its operational approach and strategic focus. In 2022 it created the role of chief transformation officer and tapped Kristy Kinney, who previously led the company's pandemic response, for the job.

Kinney's mandate touched every aspect of Wex's operations, including adopting generative artificial intelligence in call centers, standardizing project-management systems, and identifying new revenue streams. Wex says Kinney's led 230 initiatives, hit 2,300 project milestones, and worked with and advised more than 100 leaders across the organization.

"We were intentional about not just delivering outcomes," Kinney said, adding that a lot of the change "was about building a culture of always-on transformation in our workforce."

As companies across the US confront complex challenges that require overhauling strategies, reimagining business models, and adapting workforce dynamics, many are appointing chief transformation officers to drive these changes. Boston Consulting Group said it found that CTO hiring surged by more than 140% from 2019 to 2021, led by companies in consumer and industrial goods and financial institutions.

Alicia Pittman, the global people team chair at Boston Consulting Group, said the trend reflected a shift in how organizations manage change. She told BI these specialized leaders are appointed to head up specific cross-functional projects and eventually integrate their work into everyday operations. The role is often transitional.

"Their job, in my opinion, is to sort of put themselves out of a job," Pittman said.

Ravin Jesuthasan, a global leader for transformation services at the consulting firm Mercer who wrote the book "The Skills-Powered Organization," said that while this position was relatively new in the array of C-suite roles, it was emerging as "one of the most pivotal for navigating the future of work."

"It used to be that an organization would do a major transformation every eight or nine years or so, but today, due to the velocity and volatility of change, companies no longer have that luxury," he said. "They now need a dedicated leader whose job it is to look around corners, stress-test existing strategies, and figure out when to pivot if necessary."

So what exactly does a CTO do?

The C-suite has expanded over the past few decades and now brims with new titles.

The core figures, including the CEO, the chief operating officer, and the chief financial officer, focus on delivering quarterly results. Other positions center on functional areas like technology, human resources, and marketing, and strategic areas like employee engagement and sustainability.

Jesuthasan said that among these newer roles, the transformation officer stands out as forward-looking. They're tasked with preparing the organization for the future. "They help see what's coming and identify potential disruptions," he said.

In addition, he said, they must deeply understand strategy and its implications for the organizational structure. They need to be adept at connecting different areas of the business. "CTOs help the organization develop a mindset of perpetual reinvention," he said. "They have the curiosity and willingness to challenge the status quo."

He added that strong people skills are also critical for CTOs. They need to have credibility with other executives, the ability to run experiments and test new ideas, and the skills to execute effective change management while bringing employees along.

Being a chief transformation officer, Jesuthasan said, is akin to "building the train while you're driving it down the tracks."

Brandon Batt, the chief transformation officer at Quadient, a company focused on digital transformation, knows this all too well. Batt, who was appointed in 2019, helped orchestrate sweeping changes at Quadient, including streamlining the company's divisions and simplifying the workflows in various departments.

"At the end of the day, my function is here to be the support, the glue, and sometimes even the driver behind change that's needed in the business," he said.

Change is a process, of course. Can a CTO's transformation efforts ever truly be complete? "In today's dynamic landscape for technology companies, I am not sure we will ever say, 'Mission accomplished,'" Batt said.

"We just announced a new plan for 2030," he said. "It's demanding, but leaning into it is where the magic happens."

'Change is hard'

The demands of managing organizational transformation are great, especially when initiatives span disciplines and address issues such as technological advancements, industry shifts, and evolving customer trends.

"Change is hard, and it can burn people out," said Chengyi Lin, an affiliate professor of strategy at Insead who studies digital transformation.

Lin believes the CTO role should be viewed as transient, ideally lasting two to five years. "I say this with empathy and sympathy for the individual as well as for the organization," Lin added.

C-suite titles have an important "signaling function," he said. Appointing a CTO sends a message to workers and stakeholders that the organization is committed to change. Making the role permanent could dilute its significance and risk suggesting the company is in a constant state of flux rather than pursuing meaningful transformation.

Lin argued that concluding the role after a finite period doesn't mean the transformation is complete — "it means that it's eventually folded into business as usual."

He described this approach as critical for maintaining employee engagement. Gartner has found that the average employee experienced 10 planned enterprise changes in 2022; in 2016, that number was two. It also found that workers' enthusiasm for supporting enterprise change dropped significantly over the same period.

Kinney recently wound down her role as chief transformation officer at Wex. The company is continuing to work toward its $5 billion revenue goal; revenue was $2.55 billion at the end of December last year. And Kinney has transitioned to a new position as SVP of health & benefits growth. This role involves integrating her transformation work into Wex's daily operations, what she refers to as "operational excellence."

"I used to joke that if I was in that job after two years, I ought to be fired," she said.