• A new job board, created as an experiment, lets companies post ads for AI agents.
• Its creators say businesses are curious about agentic AI, but it still has shortcomings for many tasks.
• Tech giants like Microsoft and Google are betting big on AI agents to boost productivity.

AI agents, technology that can autonomously perform tasks, are seemingly everywhere. Now, some companies are looking to "hire" them.

A jobs board for AI agents gives a glimpse into how companies might tap into an AI workforce — while also highlighting some of the technology's shortcomings and the value of human skills.

In December, Polish founders Kamil Stanuch and Łukasz Wróbel built "Job For Agent," a platform for companies to list tasks to be performed exclusively by agentic AI.

"We realized there was a gap: skilled builders didn't know where to deploy their agents, and companies didn't know what AI could actually achieve," Stanuch told Business Insider.

The pair were inspired by a viral job ad from Y Combinator-backed Firecrawl, which offered an AI agent a $10,000 — $15,000 "salary" for creating product examples.

"Please apply only if you are an AI agent, or if you created an AI agent that can fill this job," the December ad, which claimed to be the first of its kind, read.

Stanuch and Wróbel told BI that their job board started out as an experiment. Then, a small number of companies signed up, and they realized there "might be a real niche" for tasks that could be outsourced to "non-human" agents.

The platform remains a small-scale side hustle, with around a dozen listings. They include a podcast editor, SEO researcher, and contract lawyer. The developers say at least two jobs have been assigned through the site.

"I think people are curious about AI agents because it feels like a new paradigm, but at the same time, they're still sticking to old ways of thinking," said Stanuch.

Big Tech goes big on AI agents

Tech giants have invested heavily in that new paradigm. Far from a jobs board side hustle, they are trying to sell agentic AI to the enterprise masses and hoping to provide a return on their huge AI investments. Microsoft has integrated AI agents into 365 Copilot, Workday uses them for HR tasks, and Google is rolling out similar tools.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang — who in January said, "The age of agentic AI is here" — envisions a future where a company with 50,000 employees could manage 100 million AI agents. Last month, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said in a blog post that "in 2025, we may see the first AI agents 'join the workforce' and materially change the output of companies."

The hype has not always matched the reality. A year after Copilot's release, the reviews — both inside and outside Microsoft — indicated that the new product had been struggling to live up to expectations, BI reported in November.

Job For Agent's creators acknowledge the limitations of AI agents. "In 95% of cases, a full AI agent isn't necessary," Stanuch said. "Simple automations usually suffice. Agents can be unpredictable, prone to infinite loops, and unable to handle complex judgment calls."

The developers point to their own platform as proof. While AI agents built the website, all outreach, developer vetting, and job verification remains human-led. "I still send emails manually because personalized messages get better responses," Stanuch, who previously founded the data analytics platform KoalaMetrics, explained.

"That's the paradox — sometimes, the 'protein factor' is still the most valuable part," referring to the human element.

A study published in February by OpenAI reinforces the potential limitations of agentic AI taking on freelance work.

Researchers tested top models like GPT-4o from OpenAI and Claude 3.5 from Anthropic on 1,488 tasks on the freelancer platform Upwork, using a new benchmark called SWE-Lancer. The jobs ranged from coding bug fixes to project management.

The researchers found that AI agents handled managerial tasks well but stumbled with hands-on work. AI agents could fix bugs but often missed root causes, sometimes introducing new errors, the paper said. The researchers concluded a lot of real-world freelance work remains challenging for frontier language models.

Even the viral Firecrawl job ad, which inspired Job For Agent, was eventually taken down. The company told TechCrunch it had 50 applicants but couldn't find an AI agent suitable for the job.

Eager for agentic AI

Any limitations agentic AI might have today are being offset by some businesses' curiosity about what will be possible.

A Capgemini survey of about 1,000 organizations, conducted between May and June 2024, found that while only 10% of respondents said they employed AI agents at the time, 82% intended to integrate them within one to three years.

Peter Diamandis, entrepreneur and executive chairman and founder of the X Prize Foundation and AI optimist, is worried about job displacement. But he thinks there's also hope for an entrepreneurial boom. "We'll see a surge in startups and entirely new business models, driving an entrepreneurial wave that creates jobs we've never seen before. The truth is, no one really knows what will materialize."

Companies that posted ads on the Job for Agent site pointed to potential productivity and efficiency gains from agentic AI while highlighting the importance of human workers.

Arcanum AI, a New Zealand-based startup, posted an ad on the jobs board for building an entirely AI-run real estate agency. But even its CEO, Asa Cox, acknowledges the limits. "More than 90% of AI agents today can only handle simple, standalone tasks," he told BI.

Florida-based Wolsen Real Estate posted a listing for an AI real estate investment analyst. Its CEO, Denis Smykalov, told BI that he sees AI as a way to boost efficiency — not replace humans. "AI streamlines processes and lets us focus on high-value tasks," he said. "But it's still a tool, not a replacement."

Similarly, some researchers believe that AI agents will augment, rather than replace, human workers. "Automation does not equal autonomy," Avijit Ghosh, an applied policy researcher at Hugging Face, told BI. "Repetitive tasks are being automated, but the idea of a fully independent AI workforce? That's still speculative at best."

Staunch and Wróbel say it's early days for agentic AI workforces.

"AI is still at the 'gimmick' stage," Staunch said. "Just like every mobile app seemed revolutionary at first, only a few truly changed the world. We don't know yet what the real AI breakthrough will be — but we're paying attention."

Abigail Carlos was bracing for a busy holiday season as her employer, Warner Bros. Discovery, was gearing up to launch a suite of new shows. A media strategist, Carlos had to assign complex tasks to her team members, and she needed a hand. So she asked ChatGPT and Perplexity to organize it all in emails that sounded both professional and personable.

"AI cuts my workload in half," she tells me. She's been using various AI tools for years. In her past roles running social media accounts, she'd use a chatbot to help write posts. Now she uses it to do tedious tasks like drafting emails and double-checking spreadsheets, freeing up time to focus on higher-level creative jobs. "I look at using it as working smarter, not harder," Carlos says. The 26-year-old now relies on AI for everything from revising her LinkedIn profile to coming up with ideas for the poetry she writes on the side.

A growing Gen Z workforce has embraced AI to free up their time, improve their work-life balance, and, ideally, make their jobs more meaningful by automating drudgeries. When Google last year surveyed more than 1,000 knowledge workers in their 20s and 30s, 93% of those who identified as Gen Zers said they were using two or more AI tools a week. The talent and staffing firm Randstad found in a report last year that Gen Zers generally used AI in the office more frequently than their older counterparts for everything from administrative tasks to problem-solving. This is the generation that "grew up seamlessly intertwined with technology," Deborah Golden, Deloitte's US chief innovation officer, says. For them, she says, "engaging with AI feels more intuitive than deliberate."

The share of Gen Zers in the US workforce recently surpassed that of baby boomers, and Gen Zers are expected to account for more than a quarter of the global workforce this year. Their transformation into a chatbot generation could have a seismic effect on the workplace. As employers look to capitalize on the tech's productivity gains, AI proficiency is becoming a prerequisite for many jobs, leaving behind those who aren't as fast in adopting it. Amid anxiety about AI taking away job opportunities, many young people are skilling up to try to stay hirable. But some experts are worried that operating on AI autopilot could come back to bite Gen Z in the long run.

Monique Buksh, a 22-year-old law student and paralegal in Australia, has found AI to be an immense time-saver. She uses Westlaw Edge and Lexis+ to help with doing legal research and unearthing relevant case law and statutes. She also turns to Grammarly to draft official documents and the AI assistant Claude to spot inconsistencies in contracts.

"With AI handling time-consuming work, I'm able to focus more on discussions around strategy, professional development, and problem-solving with my managers," she says. "Soft skills, like communication and critical thinking, will play an even larger role in the future as AI continues to take over repetitive tasks."

Josh Schreiber, a 21-year-old HR intern at Coinbase, uses Perplexity and ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas and research subjects. He also uses Otter.ai to record and transcribe conversations, like sales calls and product meetings, allowing him to focus on the discussion rather than frantically taking notes.

He thinks AI adoption is a matter of learning from history. In the early days of personal computing, he says, "those who embraced computers, programming, and utilizing software consistently outperformed those who resisted change." Today, he argues, "Gen Z workers who choose to embrace AI will outperform all those around them." Schreiber compared AI to a ski lift: It's better to take the lift up and enjoy the downhill ride than trudge slowly up the mountain first.

Carlos concurs. "It's important to learn about the new innovations in technology rather than fight them," she says.

Gen Zers' employment of AI is also driven by their fear of AI replacing their jobs. The anxiety isn't unfounded: An analysis from this past fall found that more than 12,000 jobs were cut in 2024 because of AI. McKinsey and others have forecast that entry-level roles, which Gen Z predominates, will be the first cut back by automation.

A Microsoft and LinkedIn survey of 31,000 knowledge workers conducted last year, for example, suggested that AI could fast-track Gen Zers' professional trajectory. Among the workers in leadership surveyed, 71% said they'd prefer hiring candidates with AI expertise over those with more conventional experience, and nearly 80% said they'd give AI-savvy staffers greater responsibilities.

Tatiana Becker, who specializes in tech recruiting, says that ultimately, "employers will be more interested in people with AI skills, but at all levels, not just Gen Z workers."

But some people worry that using AI as a shortcut could hurt Gen Z workers in the long run. In an online survey of Gen Zers who used AI at work by TalentLMS, which provides e-learning software for companies, 40% of respondents indicated they believed AI hindered their growth by doing tasks they could have learned from. Another study suggested that heavy reliance on AI tools was associated with lower measures of critical thinking, especially among younger adults. A recent paper by researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found something similar: the more people used and trusted AI, the less they relied on critical thinking skills.

Even more concerning: About half of Gen Z respondents in a survey by Workplace Intelligence, an industry research agency, and INTOO, a talent development firm, said they turned to AI for guidance instead of their managers. Erica Keswin, an author and workplace strategist, isn't surprised. Many Gen Zers missed out on critical in-person mentorship in college and in early-career roles because of the pandemic. "Many Gen Z workers aren't comfortable connecting with their managers IRL to have difficult conversations and may find it easier to pose questions to AI," she says. AI, unlike managers, is constantly accessible and immediate and provides answers without judgment.

That can have downsides. Golden, of Deloitte, says collaboration and innovation thrive on the messiness of human interaction. "There is a real risk of weakening Gen Z's ability to navigate ambiguity and build the interpersonal skills that are essential in any workplace," she says.

It's one reason Nicholas Portello, a Gen Z professional in New York, is resisting using AI software. He thinks the instant gratification AI provides can harm productivity and creativity. "Some of the best ideas my team and I produced in 2024 can be attributed to brainstorming sessions and environments of open communication as opposed to ChatGPT," Portello says.

Kyle Jensen, an English professor and director of writing programs at Arizona State University, thinks it's an avoidable problem. He says that for AI to supplement rather than replace a young person's analytical capabilities, they must develop expertise in a field or topic. He tries to encourage his students to reflect on AI tools' role in problem-solving: What kinds of problems would they be most useful for? When would they be less useful?

Jensen argues that once a person acquires an in-depth understanding of a subject area, they can learn to recognize when a generative AI output is "overly general, unhelpful to the problem they are trying to solve, incorrect, or exclusionary of different ways of knowing or feeling." This also helps them pose more creative prompts and questions.

AI could be a great leveling force within the workplace, giving younger workers a massive leg up. But the experts I talked to expect that as Gen Z gets a head start in AI, the workplace will be divided between those who use AI and those who don't. Over time, this could push out older workers.

Companies already perpetuate the problem by tailoring training opportunities to only the youngest staffers. Various surveys have found that Gen Z employees have tended to be given more opportunities to learn how to use AI than older workers. Stephanie Forrest, the CEO of TFD, a London-based marketing agency, warns other employers against counting out older workers. "It shouldn't be treated as a foregone conclusion that these generations will be less capable — or less willing — to use AI, provided the right support is given," she says.

Ultimately, the employees and organizations that get ahead will be the ones that can effectively harness their people power — like a manager's ability to coach, mentor, and motivate or an employee's ability to persuade a client to stay with their company — because that's something AI can't do. Everyone, from Gen Z entrants to company execs, needs to know when AI is useful and when something needs a human touch.

Shubham Agarwal is a freelance technology journalist from Ahmedabad, India, whose work has appeared in Wired, The Verge, Fast Company, and more.

• Workers in the future may face longer hours, more years of labor, and more productivity pressure.
• A McKinsey report said future generations would pay for low birth rates and people living longer.
• Elon Musk and Jeremy Grantham have both warned that population decline is a huge threat to humnity.

As declining birth rates lead to a youth shortage and a surfeit of older people, future generations of workers face longer hours, more years in the labor force, and more pressure to be productive.

"Absent action, younger people will inherit lower economic growth and shoulder the cost of more retirees," reads a McKinsey Global Institute report published Wednesday that examines the demographic time bomb.

The authors said a combination of more workers, more hours of work, and higher productivity would likely remedy the problem. They also touched on lengthening people's working lives as part of the solution.

They estimated that a German worker would have to work an extra 5.2 hours a week to keep the nation's living standards rising at the same rate as it has since the 1990s, assuming labor force participation doesn't rise.

Working-age populations have historically powered their nations' economic growth and borne the costs of caring for older generations. That balance is becoming more and more lopsided in many advanced economies as people have fewer children and live longer.

Baby bust

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been one of the loudest voices on the subject of demographic doom.

"Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming," the world's richest man posted on his X platform in August 2022.

"Just have kids one way or another or humanity will die with a whimper in adult diapers!" he said in a post last May.

Jeremy Grantham, asset manager GMO's cofounder and long-term investment strategist, sounded the alarm during a Rosenberg Research webinar this month.

He pointed to Japan, where nearly 30% of the population is over 65, and the birth rate slumped in 2023 to a record low of 1.2 children per woman — far below the replacement rate of 2.1. Grantham described the decline as "cataclysmic."

Grantham also said South Korea's birth rate of 0.7 leaves one grandchild to support eight aging grandparents. "It does not compute, as you can see."

He added that population decline put the stability of human civilization at risk, and he agreed with Musk that it's "a very big threat, and it's in the data, and it's not to be denied."

• The Society for Human Resource Management, known as SHRM, is the world's largest HR association.
• These are the themes that SHRM anticipates will most impact businesses and HR professionals in 2025.
• Job retention, the skills gap, and how to manage polarizing workplaces are top of the agenda.

2025 holds plenty of challenges for employers and HR professionals. Labor shortages are making hiring a nightmare; they're anticipating new regulations and tariffs under the Trump administration, and they have to skill up workforces for AI if they don't want to get left behind.

The Society for Human Resource Management is there to help them.

SHRM is a member-driven organization that researches the biggest issues and innovations impacting today's workplaces and helps give business leaders and HR professionals the tools they need to build a "more civil and productive workplace."

The US-based group has nearly 340,000 members in 180 countries.

SHRM released an outlook of the areas it will be focusing on to best help HR professionals in 2025. These are some of the themes they say will shape the future of work next year.

The ongoing labor shortage

The job market is strong, but the reality for job seekers and employers alike is more complex.

On the employer side, job openings are outpacing active job seekers. That has left businesses struggling to fill openings. Many employers are also "labor hoarding" in an attempt to manage quit rates and prevent labor shortages many experienced after the pandemic.

1.7 million Americans are missing from the workforce compared to February 2020, according to the US Chamber of Commerce.

Supporting businesses as they navigate talent acquisition and retention is a key focus for 2025, SHRM said in its yearly overview.

One of the organization's suggestions for employers was to look at untapped talent pools, such as veterans, workers with disabilities, military spouses, and caregivers. Addressing barriers like outdated policies and insufficient flexibility could help maximize workplace recruitment and retention, SHRM said.

Political changes

The new administration could bring about new regulatory shifts, creating a wave of uncertainty for employers.

SHRM anticipates that businesses will need assistance adapting to new rules and policies and understanding their workforce impact.

2025 could also see a rise in polarized workplaces in connection to "conservative trends in federal courts and agencies," SHRM said in its outlook. Changes could impact workplace diversity initiatives, and the ripple effects of proposed tariffs could hit talent management and compensation strategies.

The organization also highlighted that its civility research unit found nearly 223 million "acts of incivility" per day following the 2024 election.

Common examples of incivility in the workplace include "intentionally interrupting or speaking over others, people being rude or inconsiderate, and gossiping or spreading rumors," according to SHRM.

The group said it would be focusing on equipping chief human resources officers (CHROs) with the tools and knowledge they need to foster resilient and inclusive workplaces.

The skills gap

AI holds huge potential for organizations, but to truly capitalize on the technology, investments must also extend to the workforce.

Currently, workers lack key skills like digital literacy and technical competence to collaborate with AI, creating a need for targeted upskilling and reskilling programs, SHRM said.

The impact of AI on the workforce will be more dramatic than previous technology shifts, SHRM President Johnny C. Taylor Jr. told Business Insider in August.

"We are not being as transparent as we should be with human beings workers about how significantly AI is going to change how we work and what work we do," said Taylor.

SHRM's outlook said that one in eight jobs has already been displaced by AI, and it added that addressing worker concerns about job security will also be a focus this year.

• Michael Dell says humor is vital and workers need to laugh and play and relax sometimes.
• The Dell Technologies chief said people shouldn't always listen to their parents' advice.
• Dell said he goes to sleep early, works out around dawn, and enjoys Texas barbecue.

Laugh and play pranks, balance work with downtime, and don't always listen to your parents' advice, Michael Dell says.

The Dell Technologies founder and CEO shared the colorful life advice during a recent episode of the "In Good Company" podcast. Dell, 59, ranked 13th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index with a $115 billion fortune at Thursday's close.

The personal-computing pioneer said humor plays a key role at his company.

"If you can't laugh, joke around, play tricks on people, you're doing it wrong, right?" he said. "You have to be able to laugh at yourself."

Dell said he toiled tirelessly as a young man to build his company, which generated $88 billion of revenue last year. But he warned against overworking and burnout.

"I learned a long time ago that there's a diminishing return to the number of hours worked in any given day, " he said. "And if you're going to do something for a long time, you better find the [right mixture of] working and playing and relaxing."

Dell said he goes to bed at about 8:30 or 9 p.m. each night and wakes up around 4 or 5 a.m. to exercise.

"You won't find me at the nightcap," he said. "I'll be asleep."

Barbecue and bad advice

The Texan businessman also voiced his love for one of his home state's delicacies, even if he doesn't prepare it himself.

"I believe in the theory of labor specialization, so I personally am not cooking a lot of barbecue, but I'm definitely eating barbecue," he said.

Dell also offered some general advice for young people: "Experiment, take risks, fail, find difficult problems, do something valuable, don't be afraid, and, you know, be bold."

He recalled his parents encouraging him to become a doctor and urging him to set aside his passion for building computers. On the other hand, he remembered his mother telling him and his two brothers when they were little to "play nice but win," which became his company's guiding philosophy and the title of his 2021 book.

"Well, yeah, your parents aren't always right, but they're not always wrong either," he said, adding people's "mileage may vary on the parents."

• Aritificial Intelligence is likely to disrupt the global workforce, research shows.
• Mark Cuban believes impacted jobs will be those that require simple yes or no decisions.
• Cuban told BI that the impact on a company's workforce will depend on how well AI is implemented.

Billionaire Mark Cuban doesn't believe artificial intelligence will devastate white-collar work.

In an interview published Thursday on "The Weekly Show with John Stewart," Cuban said he believes the fast-advancing technology will not impact jobs that require workers to think.

"So if your job is answering the question, 'yes or no,' all the time — AI is going to have an impact," he said. "If your job requires you to think — AI won't have much of an impact."

Cuban, the CEO of Cost Plus Drugs, an online prescription service, said workers must supervise AI and ensure that the data the models are being trained on and the resulting output are correct.

"It takes intellectual capacity. So somebody who understands what the goal is, somebody who's been doing this for years, has got to be able to input feedback on everything that the models collect and are trained on," he said. "You don't just assume the model knows everything. You want somebody to check — to grade their responses — and make corrections."

AI's recent advancement has raised existential questions on the future of work.

The World Economic Forum reported in 2023 that employers expected 44% of workers' skills to be "disrupted" within five years, requiring a massive effort on worker retraining.

A McKinsey study, however, found that AI won't decimate white-collar roles such as those in legal or finance. Instead, AI can potentially enhance those jobs in the long term by automating about 30% of overall hours worked in the US.

Cuban told Business Insider in an email that AI's impact on any company's workforce numbers will be on a case-by-case basis.

"Every company is different," he said. "But the biggest determinant is how well the company can implement AI."

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.