Our department managers are still requesting budget to hire junior specialist seats, but our AI pilots show these roles are redundant. How do we redefine these roles?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When department heads request budget to hire specialist roles like writers, junior analysts, or entry-level coordinators, you must challenge their assumptions. If your pilot programs show that AI tools can handle these execution-heavy tasks, you cannot scale your headcount the old way. You must redefine the seats on your Accountability Chart®. Use the GWC™ framework to evaluate what these roles actually require now. A seat that used to require content creation might now require AI oversight, editing, and quality assurance. The person in this seat must get, want, and have the capacity to manage the AI output, not just do the manual work themselves. Instead of hiring three junior specialists, you might need to hire one senior strategist who can leverage AI to do the work of three. This changes your entire talent acquisition strategy. Before approving any new headcount requests in your quarterly meetings, run the proposed seat through the IDS® process. Force your department heads to prove why a human is needed to execute the manual tasks rather than managing the automated systems that do them.