Almost no matter who you talk to, it’s clear that in some form, job displacement with AI is going to be a thing. That leads American workers to want to explore responses to this issue, now, as we see AI advancing in leaps and bounds.

How do humans stay relevant in a market where the robots and the disembodied AI agents can do so much? What is the “moat” of the human domain? Some say it’s lived experience- but what does that mean?

I wanted to share with you some of what I heard in an interview segment at The Next Endeavor in September, in Mountain View, CA. (Disclaimer: With Imagination in Action, I help to put on these events.). Here, Laura Shact and Greg Tesimale talked about what’s to come. Shact is with Deloitte; Tesimale works at Cisco in the company’s “People Organization” where he advises on workforce planning, workforce design, and workforce transformation.

“Every job is going to change, right?” Tesimale said, in opening. “In fact, every job is already changing. And I think if we haven’t adapted the roles we’re in, we risk falling behind. There are tools and technologies available today that can help us work smarter, improve our effectiveness, and achieve better results.”

Tesimale talked about research showing that 92% of job roles will experience a “moderate to high degree of transformation,” while almost 100% of roles “will be augmented or impacted in some way by emerging technologies.”

In this context, he noted, people want to know what’s foundational to a job role.

Democratized intelligence and AI tools, he suggested, are challenging our sense of human superiority, and provoking a very common response: fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

“We’ve now built AI agents that can handle much of (human) work,” Tesimale said. “The real value is shifting toward strategic consulting, where leaders can use an agent to develop their own plans. These agents guide them through data and insights, generate recommendations, and support decision-making. They can even connect and coordinate across the organization to help allocate talent, and deploy the right skills and capabilities where they’re needed most.”

Part of the fundamental proposition, he suggests, is in the ways that AI agents can collaborate with each other, to delegate tasks, to compare notes -to scale. This is what we saw with Hugging Face, and it’s going to be part of the equation moving forward.

Target the Workflow not the Use Case

Tesimale also described how executives are still sometimes focused on enumerating use cases, while the agents have evolved more into generalized skill sets.

“The concept of a team is changing,” he added. “Teams are becoming dynamic, digital, and blended, with humans and AI agents working together within shared workflows. Humans may remain in the loop or oversee the process, guiding, governing, and directing the agents.”

“This represents a fundamental shift in how we think about work. Rather than looking at individual use cases in isolation, we need to think holistically about solutions, systems, and outcomes. The focus shifts to orchestrating the right combination of human talent, AI agents, skills, and capabilities to deliver the value the organization is seeking to achieve.”

Here’s an interesting part of the talk, where Tesimale explored contradictory signals inside of the market, on the idea of replacing human entry-level jobs with AI:

“Interestingly, what we’re seeing in practice is actually a 10% increase in entry-level roles within our overall workforce pyramid,” he said. “We’re seeing similar trends among our peers, too. And we’re all asking ourselves the same question: What’s driving this, when the broader market narrative suggests that these jobs are going to disappear? I think there are a couple of things at play. One is the concept of being AI-native. For me, AI isn’t my first language. But for people coming out of universities today, it’s increasingly second nature. They think AI-first.”

And then, he suggested, there’s a particular kind of agility in play, too.

“When (younger people) approach a problem or look for a solution, they don’t necessarily start with legacy systems or traditional ways of working,” he said. “Instead, they start by asking what they can build in an AI-native environment. And that’s a really exciting shift.”

Gen X’ers everywhere might agree.

A New Human Role: Solution Architect

Tesimale also noted that the solutions architect might be a prevailing role for the human.

“We’ve always had solutions architects, but in this system, where you’re infusing agents and multi-agents, and you’re having them connect, and you’re trying to draw architecture of all these systems and how they operate, together across data, I think people recognize how complex that is. How do you select models, right? So you have this architecture role who builds the architecture around this … that’s also, I think, more of a new role.”

Along with that, he also mentioned strategy and transformation as human endeavors.

Midway, Shact asked a good question: how much of this seismic change was deliberate?

“How much of this growth was intentional?” she inquired. “In other words, how many of these roles were created through deliberate workforce planning, where the organization recognized a new need and designed a role to address it? And how much emerged more organically—as a happy accident, an experiment, or a realization that certain tasks were taking up significant time and warranted a dedicated role? I’m curious how much of this was part of a deliberate strategy, versus something that evolved through experimentation and the learning curve of adopting AI.”

“We’re all reacting to a significant technology shift and transformation in the market, and so, yeah, I don’t think any of that was necessarily intentional to begin with,” Tesimale said. “But I think that they (were) kind of staged throughout. I think you started with governance roles and then strategy roles, but then I think the solutions architect is the one where I think people realized, hey, we’re deploying a bunch of tools and technology, and nobody is driving the orchestration layer of this. Nobody’s drawing the connection across agents. Nobody’s thinking about the user experience for users that we’re deploying these multiple agents across.”

“I would say that (the main drive) was also unintentional, but rose pretty quickly to a critical role that most organizations are looking to have now.”

Check out some of Tesimale’s eventual thoughts about data as a business commodity, and more.

“Data is the oil of the AI era, right?” he said. “We need to clean up our data at Cisco. We have … in the HR organization, I think, many organizations are doing this. We’ve built a data lakehouse. We’ve taken all of our people intelligence, or our ‘people data,’ and pulled it into one single lakehouse, so that agents can go and draw from the single lakehouse. And now we have one secure, easily accessible, always-on access to all of our people intelligence.”

This virtual lakehouse, he suggested, should be kept clean.

“If you just start to infuse agents, and you don’t actually clean up your lakehouse or your data, then it’s not going to actually exist,” he said. “Or let’s say you add tools or technology, but you don’t actually change the job roles that operate there, or the workflows, right? Now you infuse agents into a workflow, and you’re expecting humans and agents to work together. … you need to think about the operating model (and say) ‘okay, how do I think about the workflow differently?’”

There’s a lot more in the talk. Check out the full video. Here’s how Tesimale ended, with an appeal to re-skilling, but also, really, much more:

“The focus should be really on re-skilling our employees. And to the degree in which we can build learning pathways for them to find the role for the future, build the skills pathway for them and get them along that pathway, the better. But I will be honest, it’s not going to work out 100%.”

“We’re actually mindful that some people don’t want to re-skill. Some people don’t like the future job role. And so, you do have to have opportunities. The other thing that we talk about with this, along with workforce agility, is not just the re-skilling, but movement, because even though they may not be a fit for that role that they sit in today, they may be a better fit for somewhere else in the organization. And at the end of the day in all of these things, it’s very possible that that role may not exist for them long-term, and we’ve got to figure out what other path (to pursue), if it’s not re-skilling or movement. So it’s a balance.”