Originally published by The HR World.
We're delighted to share this article by Jill Gates, Vice President, Culture and People, Europe and Asia at Ensono, exploring why successful AI strategies put people at the centre of transformation.
Jill Gates, Vice President, Culture and People, Europe and Asia at Ensono explains how the right AI strategy plays positively for employees.
AI is everywhere right now - in board presentations, product roadmaps, vendor pitches, and every conference agenda worth attending. Executives are talking about transformation, analysts are publishing reports, and somewhere in the middle of it all, HR leaders are trying to work out what their actual responsibility is, both to their organisations and to their people.
Accenture’s new AI Impact Report makes the scale of that uncertainty concrete: UK workers now expect their job to be unrecognisable or gone entirely by the end of the decade, double the share from eighteen months ago, while only 7% of executives believe their workforce is fully prepared for agentic AI.
Across many boardrooms, the instinct is to reach for restructuring and displacement gets framed as the inevitable. That framing does serious damage to trust, retention, and to the organisations that will need skilled, engaged people to make AI work.
The tractor replaced the horse and plough but not the farmer – the job changed, the skills changed, and the farmer remained central to what the farm produced. AI is doing the same thing to knowledge work.
Know where your workforce stands
A genuine skills audit, built as the foundation for a real dialogue about where the organisation is heading, is where most organisations should start. Investing in AI capability before fully understanding what your people already bring, which skills transfer naturally, and where development is genuinely needed, leads to decisions made on incomplete information. Getting that picture first changes the quality of everything that follows.
"Technological advancement has historically driven overwhelmingly positive change."
Across most organisations, the people best placed to grow into AI-adjacent roles already exist inside the business – they understand the culture, the clients, and the complexity of the work in ways that take years to build. It’s an area we’ve invested significantly in, and we now have dedicated AI teams focused on helping the business redesign processes and ways of working where AI can add the most value. Many of the people leading this work transitioned from other roles within our business, bringing deep organisational knowledge alongside new AI expertise.
Getting there takes deliberate investment, active role redesign, and a clear signal from leadership that this kind of growth is valued.
Accountability cannot be delegated to an algorithm
Building a culture of responsible experimentation means helping people understand why human judgement remains central to decisions informed by AI outputs, and giving them the confidence and permission to question those outputs without that reading as resistance. Where organisations have made real investment in guidance, training, and psychological safety, people engage with AI more openly and more responsibly.
Embed learning, don't schedule it
We fully recognise that AI capabilities are not a one-off training exercise – the speed of change makes that approach obsolete before the ink is dry. Integrating AI learning into leadership development, role-based training, and performance conversations on an ongoing basis, treating it as infrastructure rather than an event, is what builds genuine, lasting capability. Curiosity must be modelled from the top, not just encouraged in a policy document as norms and best practices evolve.
Hold the uncertainty without abdicating responsibility
The broader economic picture is uncertain, and leaders who acknowledge that openly tend to earn more trust than those who paper over it. People are looking for clarity about values and direction: a credible sense of where the organisation stands and how it intends to navigate what comes next. Technological advancement has historically driven overwhelmingly positive change, from medical breakthroughs to waste reduction, and AI will be no different.
The work right now is to resist the pull toward false clarity, and it’s hard work. HR leaders who stay in that harder place, and bring their people with them, are doing something worth doing regardless of how the technology evolves.
This article was originally published by The HR World and is republished here for The Talent World audience.