Why ‘workforce orchestrator’ is the next hot job
Designing and directing mixed human and agentic teams may be key to conducting the future of work
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?