Moving AI from hype and hope to faster progress: a call for hybrid work
September 2026 | SPECIAL REPORT: HUMAN CAPITAL & EMPLOYMENT
Financier Worldwide Magazine
September 2026 Issue
We can hardly read a blog, LinkedIn post or article, listen to a podcast or TED talk, or attend a webinar or conference without receiving a dose of artificial intelligence (AI). The age of AI has turned into the rage of AI.
No question, AI is officially mainstream for individual users and organisation adopters. But does mainstream mean mainline to (or fully embedded into) the core operating system of an organisation?
Recent research by the Hoover Institute summarises four large, economy-wide business surveys (the US Survey of Business Uncertainty, the UK Decision Maker Panel, the German Bundesbank Online Panel – Firms and the Australian Business Outlook Scenarios Survey) and finds that AI promises are ahead of current use.
According to the summary, 70 percent of firms across the US, Germany and Australia report actively using AI. Two-thirds of executives say they regularly use AI, with the average reported use about one and a half hours a week, while 25 percent reported no use of AI even with firm adoption. Also, 80 percent of firms reported no discernible impact on either employment or productivity over the past three years. Firms did forecast that over the next three years, AI will increase productivity by 1.4 percent, increase output by 0.8 percent and reduce employment by 0.7 percent.
While improvements in individual performance and specific organisation tasks or work processes exist, AI promises on impact for the overall economy and macro productivity are not yet fully realised. The findings are disappointing, if not surprising.
Absorbing and fully implementing new technologies and have them become strategically relevant beyond initial steps often takes time. AI certainly has the potential to create a new form of hybrid work where technology and people come together to have high impact.
Outlined below are seven propositions to turn hype and hope into faster progress. These ideas are applied primarily to the human resources (HR) space, but these insights can also be applied to marketing, finance, health and medicine, software engineering and IT, legal, operations, education and so forth.
Recognise AI as a means and not an end. Mastering AI is not the goal. Delivering value to stakeholders (which includes all ‘humans’ in an organisation ecosystem who receive outcomes that matter to them) is the goal or end. For example, employees can be more productive and fulfill their potential by doing less routine and more meaningful work. Executives can define and realise strategic and business goals. Customers can access products and services that meet their wants and needs. Investors can increase their market value with better financial and shareholder returns. And communities can better serve all citizens.
Think of this as ‘stakeholder HR’, where AI enables value for each of these humans who engage with the organisation. AI becomes a means of accessing information and building efficiencies to meet stakeholder goals. A small handful of brilliant AI technicians will likely create the tools and processes for generative AI, agentic AI, authentic general intelligence, multi-agent systems, bots and cognitive AI. HR will help organisations access these tools and processes as products that improve the ways of working. Progress toward impact improves when we start with a desired stakeholder or business outcome and then use the AI tools to help achieve the outcome.
Deliver impact through the formula ‘human ingenuity (HI) multiplied by AI’. AI algorithms access information and improve efficiencies, yet HI remains paramount for progress toward impact. Over time, technology – and technology-driven capabilities – will increasingly become commodities, and having the right technology will only mean meeting parity. What will continue to make decisive differentiation is distinct HI that complements AI in four ways: (i) a vision of the future and what can be; (ii) innovation in the present to create new options; (iii) emotion through relationships and connections with people; and (iv) wisdom and judgment to make better decisions.
When these dimensions of HI are coupled with the algorithms of AI, impact increases.
Track return on investment (ROI) and value metrics to overcome scepticism. Putting HI first does not mean ignoring the massive opportunities – and disruptions – that AI, and especially agentic AI, will unleash in the coming years. Measurable ROI, productivity gains, customer value, investor returns and other tangible outcomes will ultimately win over even the most sceptical stakeholders. The beautiful paradox is that advanced technology will fuel a new wave of genuinely human-centered progress – by systematically eliminating the repetitive, non-human tasks of work and freeing people to apply their unique gifts.
Realise that efficiency is necessary – but never sufficient. A pure efficiency and substitution mindset – replacing humans wherever possible – will not be enough to thrive in the age of AI and agentic systems. Yet it remains the obvious and necessary first step. The critical reframe that we need to make is that the unit of analysis is the task, not the job. Jobs are bundles of tasks, some requiring human creativity and judgment and others not. No job vanishes overnight, but many tasks within it will be progressively transformed by AI (substitution, augmentation and automation).
Work-task planning may replace workforce planning because transforming tasks may (or may not) replace people. Systematically disaggregating jobs into their constituent tasks and reallocating the non-human ones to AI, is the low-hanging fruit that must be harvested before anything else. In the HR operating model, this progress shows up with AI doing many of the tasks of HR operations or shared services.
Master augmentation. Efficiency is often straightforward: it is the baseline obligation. The real art – the competitive differentiator – lies in augmenting human capability (including talent, organisation and leadership). Once tasks are disaggregated, a new question emerges: which remaining human tasks can be exponentially amplified by AI removing their bottlenecks or unlocking entirely new possibilities? This task-level thinking transforms HR from a workforce planner into an architect of hybrid capability. In the emerging hybrid competitive arena, mastering this symbiotic human-technology thinking will be a defining strategic opportunity for progress in a more value-added HR operating model and for improved HR processes as products.
See hybrid workforces as an opportunity. With the AI paradigm of augmentation, AI becomes an opportunity, especially emerging AI agents and a hybrid workforce. By mastering augmentation, the new hybrid ecosystems of humans and machines are the support network for removing frictions, bottlenecks and frequent annoyances that distract from stakeholder value. Whether the situation is an author with writer’s block, a generalist needing to turn customer promises into HR services, an HR coach seeking to help leaders focus attention, or a specialist determining which HR innovations have the highest impact, humans and machines together can progress to impact.
Learn to surf inevitable AI disruption. Surfing the inevitable AI disruption means creating a mindset of AI transformation, mastering the skillset of AI tools and establishing settings with routines (around people, information, conflict, decisions and rewards) to further AI impact. No realistic option exists for avoiding or outlasting the AI tsunami. Burying one’s head in the sand is not an effective strategy. If short-term ROI has not yet convinced someone, long-term survivability and the imperative need to build new comparative advantage must.
In the future, individual people and standalone organisations will no longer be the primary units of competition. Instead, entire hybrid ecosystems of individual competence, organisation capability and integrated constellations of humans, AI agents and tools will compete against one another. Those who shape these ecosystems, task by task and capability by capability, will make progress by setting the rules of the game.
Winfried Felser is chief executive at NetSkill Solutions and Dave Ulrich is a partner at The RBL Group. Mr Felser can be contacted by email: w.felser@netskill.de. Mr Ulrich can be contacted by email: dou@umich.edu.
© Financier Worldwide
BY
Winfried Felser
NetSkill Solutions
Dave Ulrich
The RBL Group