As AI progresses rapidly, it's important to have a realistic understanding of AI's potential for impacting our daily work. Ultimately, AI will require us to re-engineer a great deal of the traditional job architecture, allowing us to use our time for more meaningful or complex activities.
There are four phases of AI advancement that each result in increased productivity. As you review these phases, identify which phase your role or company is in now with the use of AI and how AI has impacted various roles in your business.
- Efficiency Superworker — AI tools, including Galileo, enhance the productivity of individuals by up to 20 - 30% through their automation of repetitive tasks, such as drafting emails or summarizing meetings. Employees still perform their core responsibilities faster and with greater efficiency, allowing them to focus on higher-value activities. This phase represents incremental improvement without fundamentally changing job roles.
- Empowered Superworker — In this phase, AI not only assists but takes over portions of tasks, with employees supervising, tweaking, and refining the output. For instance, AI can be prompted by humans to write code or prioritize emails, enabling workers to focus on strategic oversight. This approach elevates productivity and shifts job responsibilities from execution to orchestration.
- Highly Productive Superworker — Human workers support streamlined, highly automated processes when AI begins to restructure workflows entirely. In industries like retail and customer service, AI manages routine interactions while employees handle exceptions or more complex customer needs. For example, customers can order food at fast-food chains through AI-powered kiosks or apps, with a human employee present to ensure the order is correct and handled smoothly. This is job redesign, which increases the scale and efficiency of operations while redefining roles to support new systems and technologies.
- AI-Driven Ecosystems — In this phase, AI evolves into autonomous systems capable of making decisions and managing complex processes. Examples include self-driving cars, automated recruiting systems, or even automated recommendations to support an underperforming employee. At this point, humans shift to roles of monitoring, managing, and refining these AI-driven processes. This stage represents a transformative leap where traditional job structures give way to new skills and deeper organizational understanding.
Each technological advancement in these phases builds on the progress of the previous. With levels three and four, the jobs currently done by humans completely change. And, by being able to hand off tasks to the AI tools, the humans are freed up to do more important work.
Want to learn more? Check out Josh's podcast episode on the topic and enroll in the Academy to stay up-to-date on all the ways AI is impacting HR.
