Lamacchia Companies

As AI progresses, the way we look at staffing our companies has to progress as well. We are heading into the single greatest and most terrifying HR adjustment over the next 5–10 years. In just 2 years, AI has become a staple of many companies. Most are still scratching the surface and have yet to discover what it can really do for them. Some will never see the use, and those companies won't be able to compete with the rest of their industry.

To get a sense of where the workforce is going, look at the group best equipped to use AI: software developers. They are slowly being replaced by it. They're no longer needed to write the code, only to guide it, check it, shape it, and be the visionaries. The workforce is changing, and many will not be prepared for it. The ones who harness the new technology, embrace it, and learn it will succeed. The ones that don't, or can't, will be left behind.

So, how do you deal with something this game-changing as an HR leader? It's hard to wrap your mind around. Maybe you don't fully understand it yourself. It's a difficult balance, but when you really look at it, it always has been. You are constantly weighing your staff's wellbeing against the company's bottom line. Or at least you should be. The difference now is that someone dropped a two-ton weight on the bottom-line side of the scale. So how do you tip it back?

An HR Playbook for the AI Era

The answer isn't to resist AI. It's to prepare people for it. HR leaders should focus on three priorities: Train, Adopt, and Innovate.

Train every employee on AI. Don’t pick and choose. When the inevitable cuts come, you'll know you gave everyone a fair chance to learn and improve themselves. The ones who are eager to stay will soak it all up and grow into the new roles. Then you can choose the ones who learned how to thrive and the ones that don’t make it, at least they had a chance. Some additional cost now will save you so much more as time goes on. You may also find that sometimes, the more unlikely employees will take to AI better than you ever could have imagined.

“HR leaders who train every employee, adopt AI across the business, and encourage innovation will give more people a fair chance to succeed together tomorrow.”

Adopt AI in everything. This is a hard sell. But if you get leadership on board, the rest will follow. Leadership buy-in is critical! No one likes change, and it all starts with leadership adopting the innovation mantra themselves.

Innovate your processes, your policies, and the way things have always been done. Ask the AI how to do it, or better yet, challenge your teams! Make a competition of it. Who can come up with the most innovative way to use AI? Who can make their own job easier, or take on more, by using it?

Now this is the part that no one wants to say out loud. None of this makes the hard decisions disappear. Roles will change. Some will go away. Pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone, least of all the people you are trying to protect. There is a big difference between cutting people who never saw it coming and reshaping a workforce to fit modern times. It’s a transition, and people can survive a transition. It’s not easy. It’s not fun. It is a progress, and we’ve been here before.

That's the work in front of us. It’s not deciding whether AI belongs in the company. It’s here, and it’s not going away. We just have to do our best to get as many people ready as we can and give them a fair shot at continuing the ride with us.

So start now. The gap between the companies that trained their people and the ones that waited isn't going to stay a gap. It's going to be a canyon.