Essential or Expendable? Who Owns AI at Work and Role Clarity
- Adam Peddicord
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
He's been an Account Manager for two decades.
We were standing at the water cooler in the gym.
He told me he thinks he's becoming expendable.
He's tenured, well-respected, and hits his targets at a global tech Fortune 1000 company. But, he's not confident in using AI, his department is merging with Customer Success, and he wasn't clear what his new objectives were.
We talked for more than a bit on navigating change, my POV on AM functions joining CS, and remaining essential and not expendable.
The conversation stuck with me because it gets at a bigger question I keep seeing in AI transformation: when roles, workflows, and expectations change, who actually owns what?
What's my amigo responsible for here: his future, or just navigating his fears?
What about his leader and leadership team?
My gut reaction is he owns navigating the tidal changes but his leader must own trying to smooth the waters as best he can, or else.
The data was surprising.
The Boogeyman
Everyone is exhausted talking and hearing about AI, but you can't deny its enduring impact on the marketplace and people's thinking. Through July, AI was cited as the reason behind 112,713 announced job cuts, roughly 24% of every cut announced this year. Market trend data shows continued disruption, but optimism regarding net job gains over losses.
AI-skill jobs have grown 69% since 2019 against 9% for the total market, and 39% of core skills are expected to change by 2030.
The key question to work through is simple. Is AI substituting for the human-driven task here, or complementing it? Will the chatbot replace the Customer Service rep? Will the image reader and analysis agent remove the radiologist tech? Do the executives need to perform the quarterly read-out to the board? Where all this lands depends on the company's existing strategy and the realities surrounding the models' capabilities (let alone the organization's ability to implement and manage it).
So where does this leave my friend?
Is It Me or Them?
Two decades into my professional career, here's what I've seen work for presenting yourself as essential to an organization, regardless of technology advances.
Be a high performer in your role (top 10% of KPI attainment)
Engage your colleagues and customers in a manner that makes them enjoy working with you
Be an early adopter and self-driven learner of any new technology or direction the company is going
Hard truth for my friend. He's crushing the first two, but not taking command over the third.
He owns that. And only jumping on it will quiet the doubt birds chirping in his ear.
The numbers back that up hard. Laid-off workers are far more likely to be AI non-users than the people who kept their jobs, 62% against 50%. In tech it's starker. Workers who touched AI less than once a month were three times as likely to get cut. Age didn't explain it. Neither did education. Which means my friend's real exposure was never his birthday. It was his habits.
I did share my two cents about him becoming more comfortable with AI by:
Trying a few different agents on low-stakes life tasks, like the week's meal plan or the holiday schedule
Taking one of the free certification courses the model providers and universities offer
Using his company's own tools on one mind-numbing task, then showing his manager (the weekly readout for a one-on-one is a good candidate)
He really appreciated this. But he was still uneasy, because he didn't know what was changing for his goals and his day-to-day.
And that's the limit of what an employee can own. Employees own their adaptability. Leaders own the environment in which that adaptability succeeds or fails. If leadership hasn't defined what is changing, what success looks like, and what the employee now owns, that uncertainty belongs to leadership.
The value isn't in knowing the old playbook. It's in knowing how to use the new tools while understanding where human judgment still matters.
Leaders Must Lay the Path
Only about 5% of organizations have seen real financial gains from AI. That small group posts three-year shareholder returns roughly four times higher than everyone else. We're now nearly four years into ChatGPT hitting the market. You can sense everyone getting antsy for leading indicators all this change will pay off. And yet only 25% of leaders expect AI agents to act as autonomous teammates in the near term, with those who redesign the workflows seeing the greatest return.
Net: continuous structural change and complementary AI now, with an eye on autonomy later.
This will be a marathon, despite everyone sprinting.
Leaders need to acknowledge this, and not just dust off their change-management playbook but master it, to ensure minimal customer impact and productivity gains are realized.
I lost count of how many pivots, transformations, or pilot programs I've had to lead departments and customers through. Merging Account Management into Customer Success. Check. Deploying the latest agent to “replace” Customer Service Rep engagement with the customer. Check. Design and implement the newest customer behavioral reporting system across the company. Yep. I've helped get this done right, and we saw a jump from an NPS of 0 to 50 without additional spend. Done wrong, and you risk becoming part of the 95% still waiting for AI to pay off.
After leading enough of these transformations, I've found four things leaders need to get right:
Give people a clear plan. It doesn't need to be perfect. In fact, you should coach the team that it won't be perfect. Communicate well, stick to the vision, and the micro-pivots you make along the way will give the team its best chance. The point isn't perfection, it's that we have a plan. Share it, along with the truth statement about the constant tuning that will happen. Teams with a clear AI plan run a 43% engagement rate. Teams without one sit at 28%. That's 15 points. And it's about as cheap a performance lever as you're going to find.
Redefine ownership. A good ol' RACI goes a long way. Who's responsible, accountable, needs to be consulted, or informed? If an AI agent is now part of the workflow, put it in there too, along with the human who owns the feedback loop when it gets something wrong. (Reminder, AI will never be perfect!)
Define where AI fits. Make sure staff know the outcomes that matter and where human judgment remains essential. These instructions must be explicit and defined by role.
Actively support adoption. Be present. Tell them that if they're uncomfortable, get in there anyway and bring it back to you so you can work through it together. Give them the how-to guides and build out the knowledge base behind them. Report progress, find your emerging power users, and let them spread it. Build champions, give shoutouts, recognize the wins. Where employees say their manager actively backs AI use, engagement sits at 48%. Where they don't, 30%. That's the biggest single lever you have.
Onward
I'm not sure I really “solved” anything for my friend in our 10-minute water cooler conversation.
But he felt better about managing it.
The reminder was simple: control what you can control, and face the fear by getting in there and using the thing rather than avoiding it.
The most useful part was getting clear on what he owns, what his leadership owns, and what the AI owns.
The tool will do its thing, right or wrong. But it's the humans that are going to make it work.
I'll catch up with him in a few weeks.
I'm confident he and the AI will do their thing and do it well. His leadership team has the harder job, and the one that decides whether any of this actually lands.
Go get your lift on!
One question for the comments: when your org last shifted roles or workflows around a new tool, did anyone hand you a written definition of what you now own? I'd like to know how rare that actually is.
If you're trying to figure out where AI and automation actually belong in your organization, let's talk.
I help SaaS and healthcare organizations make smarter decisions about AI, automation, Customer Success, and RevOps so the technology actually improves outcomes for customers, employees, and shareholders.
Cheers,
Adam Peddicord
Customer Success by Design
Sources
Challenger, Gray & Christmas. July 2026 Job Cuts Report, August 2026. challengergray.com
Gallup. “Employee Engagement Remains Flat as AI Adoption Accelerates,” July 2026. gallup.com
Gallup. “U.S. Workers Continue to Report Downsizing,” June 2026. gallup.com
Boston Consulting Group. “AI Transformation Is a Workforce Transformation,” 2026. bcg.com
McKinsey & Company. The State of Organizations 2026 and The State of AI, 2025 to 2026. mckinsey.com
PwC. 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, June 2026. pwc.com
World Economic Forum. The Future of Jobs Report 2025. weforum.org
LLMs were used to support research, grammar, and structural clarity. All thoughts, opinions, lived experiences, and recommendations are my own.
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