Why ‘workforce orchestrator’ is the next hot job

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Hello and welcome to Working It, the FT’s weekly guide to the workplace and leadership.

The Working It team visited the University of Southampton this week, filming our forthcoming video series. We coincided with graduation day 👨‍🎓 for hundreds of students: the graduands (great word!) and their families were buzzing with positive energy 😍.

The FT’s Petros Gioumpasis films graduation day in the sunshine ☀️

The celebration was a wonderful counterbalance to the “jobpocalypse” narrative around entry level jobs; it’s a good moment to reflect that a degree is still valuable 💰. Recent research from the University of York, QS and Public First suggests “AI, when paired with a highly skilled workforce — could unlock a cumulative £490bn for the UK economy by 2030”. These gains, the report says, are contingent on a supply-side issue: “an expanded pipeline of graduate-level talent”. A positive thought for anyone (and their parents) contemplating uni this year.

Read on for the latest insights into workforce shifts emerging in the next phase of AI transformation — and how to keep humans in the loop 🤞🏼.

Managers: take up the baton! 🎼

It’s hard to visualise how traditional organisations might be structured in future. That much-touted “post-org-chart” world is still a way off for many of us (and, btw, my colleague Andrew Hill was writing about the need to kill the org chart back in 2016 🔮). We are seeing, though, new roles and structures emerging from this period of AI acceleration and intense experimentation.

One new job class is “hybrid workforce orchestrators”. This is essentially a workforce design and transformation role, focusing on the integration of AI bots with human workforces. The term appears in a new paper about AI and the rise of hybrid labour markets from Adecco Group, the recruitment company. The main paper is published tomorrow, but I spoke to the company’s chief executive, Denis Machuel, to get some early insights into how he sees the role evolving. “This idea of orchestration is to be strategically clear about what remains done by humans,” he said, “and what is to be done by agents, and also robots. But also, how skills are evolving, and what new skills are going to be needed.”

Beyond that, Denis believes orchestrators will be tasked with reinventing workflows around these “hybrid” workforces — hybrid here means a mix of humans, agents and robots.

This sort of strategic workforce planning, Adecco believes, may develop into a major category of consulting and recruitment work. It’s “upstream” of day-to-day operations, and a smart orchestrator will look at the data and see where things need to change, take note of the skills gaps — and fill them.

In many organisations, however, “orchestrator” roles will probably be filled by redeployed staff. And there’s good news for anyone who fancies doing these jobs: they “may become one of the most important people in the organisation”, says Gleb Tsipursky, a behavioural scientist and author of the forthcoming The Psychology of AI Adoption at Work: From Resistance to Results. “They will influence which tasks employees keep, which tasks agents absorb, whose skills receive investment, and whose role appears redundant. That makes this a governance role, rather than simply a workforce-planning role.”

The result, Gleb says, is that the orchestrator “may become the person who quietly decides whose work the organisation values. That power 🦹🏽‍♂️ needs transparency, employee participation and clear accountability.”

Other new roles, Gleb says, will emerge “around human-AI workflow design, algorithmic accountability, AI coaching, skills redeployment and employee advocacy”. He also expects to see the growth of a role similar to an AI ombudsperson, someone employees can approach when automated systems make opaque or unfair decisions.

In some organisations, the chief human resources officer might end up being the likely candidate to fill the “orchestration” role. The social scientist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic wrote in the Harvard Business Review last month about the ways that AI is reshaping board roles, mentioning that “the CHRO is moving from administering people to architecting human-machine systems”.

As HR moves to become a tech-focused function, what will happen to the people and culture of organisations? In a world where AI becomes infrastructure, rather than a competitive advantage, we keep being told that great workplace culture and the human edge will be the differentiator in successful businesses. Is the answer to create a very senior chief culture officer (or orchestrator) role? Keen to hear your views: [email protected].

In a nutshell: New leadership roles will probably focus on overseeing people and bots — as well as strategic planning. Human judgment, oversight and accountability will all be vital. Related: “orchestration” is one of the biggest buzzwords in AI and tech at the moment.

In a nutshell: New leadership roles will probably focus on overseeing people and bots — as well as strategic planning. Human judgment, oversight and accountability will all be vital. Related: “orchestration” is one of the biggest buzzwords in AI and tech at the moment.

Want more? A long list of luminaries has signed a short statement — We Must Act Now — calling for action from economists, policymakers and tech leaders to understand the economics of “transformative AI”. They note that AI “could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter timeframe”.

Want more? A long list of luminaries has signed a short statement — We Must Act Now — calling for action from economists, policymakers and tech leaders to understand the economics of “transformative AI”. They note that AI “could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter timeframe”.

Five top stories from the world of work

Employees are scheduling fake meetings to make time for real work: It’s hard to stop the endless “work of work” that consumes our days, but some people are blocking out time for focus and coming up with ingenious ruses to make it look like they are in meetings. By Srinidhi Balakrishnan.

Training AI models might be the chance for a workplace power play: Institutional knowledge has been downplayed in the rush to automate work and replace human workers. As Sarah O’Connor points out, a lot of the knowledge required to make AI truly useful in many jobs is locked in employees’ heads.

Welcome to FixFest: Emma Jacobs visits the festival for builders, where bricklaying competitions run alongside talks about mental health in the construction industry. It’s run by Fix Radio, a dedicated radio station for tradespeople.

Trash! — a garbageman’s surprising look back on a life of grime: A Canadian refuse collector, Simon Paré-Poupart, has written about his life collecting other people’s waste. Garbage, he says, “tells the whole story” of our lives — even if we preferred that it didn’t. Review by Stephen Smith.

The UK’s biggest university is a private company: Alongside the traditional university sector, some for-profits are enrolling tens of thousands of students, many of whom don’t have formal educational qualifications. Is this a disaster in the making? Chris Smyth, Elizabeth Bratton and Amy Borrett investigate.Employees are scheduling fake meetings to make time for real work: It’s hard to stop the endless “work of work” that consumes our days, but some people are blocking out time for focus and coming up with ingenious ruses to make it look like they are in meetings. By Srinidhi Balakrishnan.Training AI models might be the chance for a workplace power play: Institutional knowledge has been downplayed in the rush…