Our leadership team is debating our future hiring plan because our current employees are using AI to complete their tasks much faster. Should we freeze all new hiring and focus on upskilling our existing staff, or should we actively recruit native AI prompt specialists to replace our slower executors?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Do not rush to hire native AI prompt specialists who lack deep domain expertise. It is far easier to teach an experienced, culturally aligned employee how to use AI than it is to teach a prompt engineer how to understand your core business, client needs, and operational nuances.

Your immediate strategic move is to prioritize using AI to increase employee productivity within your current team. Identify the cumbersome processes that currently keep your people bogged down in low-value, repetitive tasks. Use AI workflows to streamline these specific bottlenecks, which frees up your existing staff to focus on high-impact strategic priorities.

Gradually evolve your existing roles on the Accountability Chart. As manual execution tasks disappear, the GWC™ of each seat will naturally shift from doing the work to reviewing and strategic steering. Update your hiring plans on your V/TO® to reflect this shift.

Instead of adding new execution-focused headcount to support your growth, your hiring plan should focus on adding strategic seats that require high emotional intelligence, complex problem-solving, and relationship management. These are the human complements that Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue become highly valuable as automated tasks become cheap and plentiful. Invest your capital in upskilling your current team first, and only hire when your Scorecard capacity metrics show a clear, unavoidable bottleneck in human strategic oversight.