Your future workforce often already works for you. This is not nostalgia or loyalty talking. It’s economics.
When Standard Chartered redeployed an existing employee from a “sunset” job, or a job that was going away, to a “sunrise” job, a new emerging role, it cost the bank $49,000 less than hiring externally.
Yet too often, when we hear executives talk about ushering in a new era of work and jobs with AI, they focus on two things: job cuts and hiring new digitally-savvy talent. Neither is the best play. Instead, they should consider transforming the workforce they already have, not just the jobs and the work.
This matters more than you think
Yes, AI will change how work gets done and maybe the skills you need. But not all skills are created equal. Technical skills—the ones most susceptible to AI disruption—can be taught relatively quickly or learned on the job. The skill of operating in your organization’s context is far harder to replace or teach – the know-how that makes someone effective in your culture, with your systems, your routines, your unwritten rules. It is this contextual intelligence your workforce already possesses that makes your company your company, not a generic operation running the same AI tools as everyone else.
