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InsightsThe Fluid Future of Work: Rethinking Roles in the Age of Intelligent MachinesMark Marone, PhDJuly 25, 2025Sylverarts/Getty ImagesIn brief:AI-driven role changes require proactive, nonlinear approaches to workforce planning and leadership development.Leaders must transition from traditional decision makers to sense makers, orchestrating complex AI-human interactions.Learning and developments priority shifts from closing existing skills gaps to anticipating future capability needs, ensuring organizational agility.As AI advances, human employees roles are evolving in unpredictable ways. Organizations must now anticipate and prepare for nonlinear role shifts, where job responsibilities fragment, fuse, or disappear altogether. The ability to proactively adapt leadership, learning, and development strategies to this new reality is emerging as an important competitive differentiator.To meet this challenge, learning and development (L&D) must not only close current skills gaps but also forecast future ones. This means redefining how we think about jobs, how we develop talent, and how we support leaders who are navigating uncharted organizational terrain.The Need to Prepare for the Nonlinear Evolution of RolesIn an AI-transformed world, job roles are being rapidly reshaped. Traditional workforce planning models arent enough to get the job done. Organizations are faced with the need to rethink their approach to workforce planning and development.This imperative, which we call predicting the nonlinear evolution of roles, was identified by global leaders as one of the three most urgent objectives in our 2025 Global Leadership Development Study. Alongside the rise of digital labor and the acceleration of AI, it is changing not just how work gets done but also who does it and what capabilities they need to succeed.For decades, workforce planning has typically followed a relatively linear and role-based approach: define the roles needed to support strategic goals, identify the skills and experiences required for each, and create structured career paths to build proficiency. That model no longer works. Today, leaders must anticipate role changes before they happen and equip teams to adapt in real time.In our study, 44% of respondents said their organization is placing greater emphasis on upskilling and reskilling within leadership development. And almost half (45%) said expectations are rising for leaders to actively support their own teams AI upskilling.These trends highlight the fact that leaders themselves are seeing their roles change, sometimes dramatically. Moves that create entirely new leadership roles, such as merging IT and HR departments, are making headlines.1 Leaders are increasingly valued as sense makers who can deal with complexity and guide AI-enabled systems rather than as decision makers and subject matter experts. They are navigating new responsibilities that may not have existed a year ago, and that may change again in six months.AI Is Driving and Redefining Role EvolutionAs AI tools grow more sophisticated, they are no longer simply assisting with tasks. Increasingly, they are performing end-to-end processes autonomously. In many companies, AI has already evolved from the role of helpful assistant to agent.One multinational company we interviewed shared their use of a 4B framework to determine how work gets done in the future: Will a task be handled by human talent that is bought, built, or borrowed? Or will it be transferred to a bot or button (AI)? This type of thinking, which was once rare, is becoming common across industries and functions.In some cases, AI orchestrates entire workflows. Take UBS, for example. Since 2024, the financial firms AI-driven service approves loans without human intervention. Credit officers didnt disappear, but their responsibilities changed. Today, they define parameters, conduct scenario testing, and coach AI systems rather than make each decision themselves.That kind of shift has implications for how we design leadership development. L&D teams must prepare leaders to take on new responsibilities, some of which may not be clearly defined yet. This requires not only technical upskilling but also a rethinking of leadership identity, agency, and capability.Whats at Stake: Leadership Pipelines and Capability GapsThe nonlinear evolution of roles affects more than just current job holders; it upends the traditional leadership pipeline. In industries where AI displaces entry-level roles, organizations may lose the proving grounds where future leaders once developed. Without action, this will create serious capability gaps down the road.Thats why the most forward-looking companies are redesigning development paths to reflect the new reality. They are investing in tools to model likely role changes, analyze skill adjacency, and forecast future workforce needs. Crucially, they are embedding learning earlier and more broadly to build readiness, not just at the top but across the enterprise.What L&D Can Do NowSo how should L&D leaders respond? Start by shifting the question from What does this role require now? to What will this role likely become? Then, work backward. What experiences, knowledge, and capabilities must be built today to support success tomorrow?Effective teams are:Building dynamic role profiles that adapt as new technologies and business models emergeIntegrating AI into workforce planning tools to simulate different futures and surface new opportunitiesRedesigning development programs to account for lateral moves, hybrid roles, and new leadership expectationsSupporting leaders through transitions, helping them redefine their contributions as machines take over more routine tasksThis is not about predicting the future perfectly. It is about being prepared for many possible futures and helping people adapt and thrive in any of them.The Bottom LineStatic job descriptions are a thing of the past. The future requires leaders who recognize that human and digital roles will be frequently reimagined. To lead in this world, people must be trained not just to perform but to pivot.The role of L&D is no longer to close skills gaps. It is to help organizations anticipate them. And to do that, L&D leaders must be fast, fluid, and relentlessly future-focused.Now is the time to rethink not just what we teach but why we teach it and whether its whats needed to prepare people for what lies ahead in the world of work.Explore further insights by downloading our 2025 Global Leadership Development Study: Fast, Fluid, and Future-Focused.Research Report2025 Global Leadership Development Study: Fast, Fluid, and Future-FocusedDownloadBousquette, Isabelle, Why Moderna Merged Its Tech and HR Departments, CIO Journal, May 12, 2025. https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-moderna-merged-its-tech-and-hr-departments-95318c2a?utm. Future of WorkLeadership DevelopmentStrategic AlignmentShare this resourceShare on LinkedInShare on FacebookShare on XShare on WhatsAppEmail this PageConnect with usChange isnt easy, but we can help. 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