Earlier this year, Deloitte made an announcement: it was scrapping its traditional career progression model and adopting a new, more future-forward structure. Where employees were once hired on as analysts before getting promoted to consultants and then managers, the professional services behemoth has overhauled that ladder with something flatter and more specific: a system of skill families and subfamilies, and a single leadership tier called "leaders."

The reason? AI, of course. Last year, Deloitte announced it was committing $3 billion in generative AI development through 2030, a move that’s effecting tectonic changes across the organization. According to an internal presentation, reassessing job titles is meant to “drive greater market relevancy and clarity” amid an increasing focus on automation.

Deloitte may be one of the most high-profile organizations to start reimagining its hierarchies and the positions within them, but it won’t be the last. Here’s why.

Job titles were never meant to perfectly capture the full breadth of an employee’s duties. In reality, they’re more of a convenient shorthand to place someone within an org chart. According to research from the compensation consultancy Pearl Meyer & Partners, 80 percent of companies use job titles to describe where employees sit in the corporate hierarchy.

The system worked well enough for decades—but that was before AI, and the speed at which it’s redefining work and those who perform it. Since the public launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, job postings for occupations involving structured and repetitive tasks decreased by 13 percent, while employer demand for roles requiring more analytical, technical or creative work grew 20 percent, a working paper co-authored by Harvard Business School’s Suraj Srinivasan found .

Ben Zweig, CEO of the workforce intelligence company Revelio Labs, told SHRM in an interview that institutional habits keep organizations locked in traditional job architectures, layering in new roles “largely because it reflects longstanding practices rather than intentional design.”

When organizations do undertake an overhaul, “the central objective should be to establish a standardized ‘common language’ that reflects the real work being performed rather than relying only on titles or skills,” he said.

How AI Is Changing The Game

AI is dramatically changing the jobs landscape, but not in the way many people think. Yes, some companies are asserting that automation has made many employees redundant, and are conducting layoffs accordingly. Snap, parent company of Snapchat, has become the latest to announce cuts, downsizing by 1,000 employees—16 percent of its workforce—due to “rapid advancements in artificial intelligence.”

But more so than eliminating jobs, AI is taking over individual tasks that, taken together, jobs are made up of. A support team member, for example, once handled dozens of routine inquiries. Now, they supervise AI systems that handle those rote queries while also focusing on more complex escalations.

One way to think about it is that jobs are being “disassembled,” writes Forbes contributor Bernard Marr. But many companies haven’t yet come to grips with this new reality, meaning they haven’t put new frameworks in place to accommodate the changes. “This can leave employees doing work that no longer aligns with their job descriptions or with the expectations they had when taking on roles,” Marr writes. “At the same time, managers become unsure how to evaluate contributions or to assign human resources efficiently.”

What Leaders Should Do Now

Most of us aren’t looking to enact a wholesale job title revolution, but Deloitte’s pivot raises some practical implications for leaders.

In the AI era, it’s important to hire for what people can actually do, not their past job titles. At Jotform, we embrace a holistic hiring process that doesn’t rely too heavily on a specific number of years’ experience or a checklist of credentials. Instead, we look at the whole person: how do they think, what can they do and what qualities will they bring to the table?

As generative AI has streamlined hiring , we’ve been able to expend more time and resources investigating a candidate’s potential and developing a real understanding of their strengths. In the past, we had to sift through dozens—sometimes hundreds—of resumes individually, painstakingly filtering for even the most basic qualifications, like a degree. That’s no longer the case. We’re now able to spend more time than ever deeply considering strong candidates, since AI has removed so much of the tedious busywork that once bogged us down.

For your existing employees, audit their responsibilities and how they’re using AI to handle them. Creating a culture of AI transparency is a must—teams should feel empowered to share what they’re automating, not fearful that their job will disappear. The goal is to have an up-to-date understanding of where the real work is happening, and make sure you're building around that rather than an antique org chart.

AI is quickly dismantling the hierarchies that have helped define work for decades. For forward-looking leaders, now is the time to start thinking about what tasks make up a job, and how those roles will evolve going forward.