We have several open seats on our Accountability Chart, and our Visionary wants to freeze hiring to see if we can automate those functions with AI instead. Our department heads are pushy about needing more bodies. How do we objectively evaluate whether a seat can be automated or if we genuinely need to hire a human?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Before you rush to hire or freeze your hiring entirely, you must evaluate the open seats through the lens of operational efficiency. Our goal should always be to prioritize using AI to increase employee productivity, freeing up human capacity before adding headcount.

To make an objective decision, look at the Accountability Chart and analyze the roles and responsibilities of the open seats. Break down the daily activities of those seats. If more than half of the tasks associated with a seat are repetitive, administrative, or low-value data manipulation, that seat is a prime candidate for AI automation.

Use AI to streamline these cumbersome processes, and then see if the remaining high-value responsibilities can be absorbed by your existing team members, whose own capacity has been expanded by AI tools. This allows you to gradually evolve roles within the organization, ensuring your human employees are focused exclusively on high-impact priorities.

If your department heads still insist they need more bodies, challenge them to prove that their existing team members are operating at maximum AI-augmented capacity. Bring this to your next Level 10 Meeting to IDS the resource constraints, and only approve a new hire when you are certain the seat requires high-level human decision-making that technology cannot replicate.