Understand a job before you eliminate it—a guide to redesigning work in the age of AI

Most AI redesigns start with a task list. That’s why they fail. Start with what the role is for, and the picture changes completely.

Over the past three years, Ford has hired about 350 veteran engineers, some of them former employees, to find the failure points its automated quality systems and AI inspection tools were missing. It needed them because, as its vice president of vehicle hardware engineering has since admitted, the company had assumed that introducing artificial intelligence and feeding it design requirements would be enough to produce a high-quality product. It was not.

Ford is not an outlier. Klarna announced in February 2024 that its AI assistant was doing the work of 700 customer service agents. By May 2025, it was recruiting human agents again, its CEO conceding that the company had focused too much on cost while letting quality slip. The data tells the same story. A survey of 1,000 C-suite and senior........

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