Dr. Gleb Tsipursky – The Office Whisperer
Nirit Cohen – WorkFutures
Angela Howard – Culture Expert
Drew Jones – Design & Innovation
Jonathan Price – CRE & Flex Expert
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy laid out an ambitious vision for embedding AI across Amazon’s ecosystem — from products and services to internal operations — touting a future powered by generative AI, billions of smart agents, and major efficiency gains.
But buried in that announcement was a stark message. As Jassy stated, Amazon anticipates its corporate headcount will shrink as AI adoption accelerates and productivity improves.
At the same time, Amazon is urging employees to embrace AI, upskill rapidly, and reimagine their roles. This seems to signal that jobs will disappear. There’s no blueprint, no shared plan. Just a push to adapt. Quickly.
This is how enterprise AI efforts falter before they begin.
Trust Comes First
AI-driven transformation is about rethinking how people and technology can create value together.
And here’s the core challenge: only people can reimagine how their work changes. But they won’t do it if they don’t believe they have a place in the outcome.
Without clarity, confidence, or a compelling vision for how humans fit into the AI-powered future, enterprise AI initiatives are likely to stall. PwC 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer backs this up: industries embracing AI most effectively are seeing productivity climb, with revenue per employee growing three times faster than in slower-moving sectors.
These gains aren’t coming from surface-level automation. They’re the result of treating AI as a lever for deep, structural transformation — redefining entire business models, not just streamlining tasks.
As PwC U.S. Chief AI Officer Dan Priest put it on The Future of Less Work podcast: “If you’re in the 5, 10, 15% efficiency range, that’s not structural. You need to be in the 30, 40% efficiency range before you can rethink how a function gets managed.”
Enterprise AI requires bold thinking. Leaders must go beyond tinkering and ask: if we were designing this function from scratch — with AI built in — how would it work?
But leaders can’t answer that alone.
People Won’t Build the Future if They Don’t See Themselves in It
Technology isn’t the biggest barrier. People are.
The employees closest to the work (those serving customers, running operations, solving problems) are best positioned to reimagine how AI can make things better. They know where the pain points are. They understand where human judgment still matters most.
But here’s the tension: if employees think AI is just a way to cut costs and eliminate roles, why would they help redesign the work? If they feel like they’re helping build the system that could replace them, they’ll resist or quietly slow down the process.
As Priest warned: “Don’t underestimate what people will do to undermine change if they don’t see a value proposition for them at the end of that journey.”
When AI is introduced solely as a cost-cutting tactic, trust erodes. But the greatest benefits of AI come from empowering workers, not sidelining them. It’s not about removing people from the equation. It’s about enhancing what they bring to the table.
A Foundation of Trust and Skills
Companies that treat AI purely as a tool for reducing headcount miss the bigger opportunity. That mindset leads to what PwC calls “small thinking” — doing the same things slightly faster or cheaper. The real potential comes from thinking bigger: using AI to build new capabilities, new revenue streams, new ways of creating value.
That can’t happen without employees.
It starts with trust. Workers must believe they have a meaningful role in the future. That belief is built when leaders show how AI can elevate human work and when employees can see themselves in the company’s future.
As Priest said: “The leaders who are most visionary and most articulate about what that evolving value proposition looks like will build the most trust in their workforce.”
And it continues with skills. People need more than encouragement to “get curious.” They need training, support, and a roadmap for adapting.
According to PwC, skill needs in AI-exposed roles are changing at twice the rate they were just a year ago. Jobs aren’t disappearing, but rather evolving. And if companies don’t help workers adapt, they’ll struggle to fully capture AI’s benefits.
Organizations must share responsibility for upskilling. Simply telling employees to go figure it out isn’t enough. Companies need to invest in training, provide opportunities for applied learning, and design roles around where AI and human talent intersect.
AI Through People, Not Around Them
The future of enterprise AI should center on leveraging both humans and technology together. Successful AI transformation won’t come from installing tools alone; it will come from designing an ecosystem where people and AI can thrive side by side.
That starts with a shared, actionable vision. One that makes clear where people fit, how their work evolves, and what new possibilities AI unlocks — for the business and for them.
Because if we want people to help build what’s next, we have to show them they belong in it.
