6 Realities About Work in the AI Era That Josh Bersin and Siobhan Savage Want Every Leader to Face

Live Broadcast recap on reinventing work, rewriting job architecture, and getting AI-ready

The job architecture you’ve relied on for years? It’s officially obsolete.

In our latest live broadcast, “Work Intelligence is Here: Redesign or be Left Behind”, Reejig CEO & Co-Founder Siobhan Savage and renowned industry analyst Josh Bersin laid it bare: if you're still organizing work around static job descriptions, you're already behind. 

AI is forcing a total rethink of how work gets done—and HR Leaders are at the center of this shift.

Together, Siobhan and Josh unpacked:

• Why 92% of CEOs are betting on AI—but only 23% believe their people can adapt
• What a task-based view of work unlocks that a job-based view never could
• The fatal flaws in “BYO AI” strategies
• How to rewire your workforce design for speed, scale, and transformation
  
  

Missed the session? Or want to send the key takeaways to your CEO or transformation lead?
Here’s what you need to know—and what to do next.

1. Job Architecture Is the Achilles’ Heel of Workforce Transformation

The systems we use to structure work were built for a slower, more predictable world.
Today, they’re not just outdated—they’re actively getting in the way.

Job architecture was broken long before AI showed up. It was designed for industrial-era factories, not dynamic, task-based work. Now, AI is simply exposing the cracks:

• Generic job descriptions that say nothing about the actual work
• Roles that bear no resemblance to what people do
• Structures that collapse under the weight of real-time change

“This isn’t like buying Workday and hoping everyone becomes more productive. This is a full business reinvention.” — Josh Bersin

“Forget AI for a second. Job architecture was already broken. Whoever designed that was building for the dinosaur era.” — Siobhan Savage

If you keep plugging AI into broken foundations, you’ll keep getting broken results.

2. Redesign Work at the Task Level—Not the Job Level

Jobs are too broad and too static to support AI deployment. If you want to identify automation opportunities, empower AI agents, or support reskilling, you need to understand your workforce at a task and subtask level.

“People have skills. Jobs and work have tasks. If you want to deploy AI strategically, you need task-level data.” — Siobhan Savage

“We found a company with 100,000 employees and 65,000 job titles. That’s insanity. In reality, they had about 3,000 jobs—just labeled 60,000 different ways.” — Josh Bersin

3. The AI Gold Rush Is Causing Chaos

Too many companies are embracing a “BYO AI” approach—where individual teams adopt tools in silos, slowing everything down. Without enterprise-level orchestration, these efforts create more inefficiency than innovation.

“Everyone’s out buying tools because the CEO said ‘Go do AI!’ But that kind of strategy is breaking the machine.” — Siobhan Savage

“Most of the value won’t come from the tools you buy—it’ll come from how you redesign the way work gets done.” — Josh Bersin

4. From Experimentation to Engineering: The Four Stages of AI Adoption

Josh Bersin introduced a practical model for AI maturity—moving from personal productivity gains to full-scale organizational reinvention:

• Level 1: Make existing work easier. (Same job, better tools).
• Level 2: Major steps eliminated, but the job is the same. (Same job, tools eliminate work).
• Level 3: Re-engineered work, partnered with agents. (New job, redesigned process, agents automate work).
• Level 4: Autonomous intelligent agents, people training and managing the AI. (New job, redesigned process, people “manage” the agents).

“Level four is where you get 100–300% returns. That’s where Reejig comes in—to make it easy and scalable.” — Josh Bersin

5. AI Transformation Needs a New Role: The Chief Work Officer

To succeed, organizations need someone responsible for orchestrating people, AI, and work design—not just job titles or headcount.

“HR is not driving this. It’s coming from CEOs and Chief AI Officers. But they don’t understand work. That’s your opportunity to lead.” — Siobhan Savage

“This discipline—true work design—hasn’t existed until now. It’s time to let go of old job titles and build something better.” — Josh Bersin

6. Learning Will Shift from Training to Enablement

As work evolves weekly, L&D must keep up. That means shifting from career ladders to real-time enablement—based on emerging tasks and AI-augmented roles.

“We’re entering a world of just-in-time learning. You’re not just removing tasks—you’re creating new ones no one’s ever done before.” — Siobhan Savage

“The L&D playbook needs to be rewritten. We’re moving from linear learning paths to continuous enablement.” — Josh Bersin

Now What? What Leaders Should Do Next

To recap, here’s what bold, responsible leaders can do right now:

• Audit your work, not just your jobs. Build a task-level understanding of what people actually do.
• Avoid AI chaos. Coordinate efforts across functions. Don’t let everyone go rogue.
• Partner with your Chief AI Officer. They need your insight into work—more than you might think.
• Demand proof from AI vendors. Don’t get sold on hype. Ask for evidence and impact.
• Prepare for impact. New AI agents will change capacity, expectations, and required skills overnight.

In short, if you can’t help your CEO be bold and responsible—by figuring out where AI should be applied, which jobs are transforming, and how to reskill your people—you’re no longer fit for the future of work leadership.

“If I were a CEO, and you couldn’t help me do this, I’d find someone who could.” — Siobhan Savage

Keep the Conversation Going

Whether you're leading HR, transformation, or AI strategy, the message is clear: reinvention is not optional. It’s essential. And we’ll need to work together on this.

📩 Want to learn how Reejig’s Work Ontology and Work Intelligence platform can help you lead this transformation responsibly? → Talk to a Work Strategist.

📺 Watch the full replay → Recording

📝 Apply to join our Work Design Collaborative Virtual Program where we educate pioneering HR leaders on how to architect the future of work in the AI era.

📅 Next Up: Live Broadcast with Josh Bersin + Josh Newman, Global Head of People Strategy & Experience at WPP. Come along to hear how WPP is tackling AI transformation head-on—consolidating job architectures, identifying capacity-building opportunities, and using Work Intelligence to build task-level playbooks that scale across the business. → Register Now.