Aligning your workforce strategy with your AI ambition
By 2036, AI solutions introduced to augment or autonomously deliver tasks, activities or jobs will result in over half a billion net-new human jobs.” ¹
AI is no longer a future disruptor, it’s reshaping businesses today. But many leaders are still asking: How do we integrate AI into our strategic workforce planning (SWP) across the short, medium and long-term?
The urgency is real. With “39% of the workforce will be disrupted by AI in the next 2–5 years” ¹, this isn’t just about automation. It’s about reimagining roles, skills and structures for your business to thrive.
AI IS RESHAPING BUSINESS – ARE YOU READY?
Organisations are investing in AI at pace. But investment alone doesn’t guarantee transformation. AI is fundamentally changing how businesses create, deliver and capture value.
This Gartner® AI Workforce Impact Matrix1 helps map this disruption across two dimensions:
- AI ambition – Are you operating within, pushing or breaking boundaries?
- Business demand – Is it increasing, stable or declining?
Together, these help define your AI operating model, and the workforce strategy that must support it.
THREE KEY STEPS TO TURN AI AMBITION INTO WORKFORCE REALITY
- Make a strategic choice
As AI maturity grows, your organisation must make a deliberate choice about its ambition.
- Stay within existing boundaries: Do you use AI to enhance existing operations (e.g., automating reporting, improving forecasting)?
- Push the boundaries: Do you transform how value is delivered with AI as a co-pilot (e.g., augmenting decision-making, enabling predictive analytics)?
- Break new boundaries: Do you reinvent the business with AI at the core (e.g., launching AI-native products, reconfiguring entire business models)?
As you develop your AI ambition and embed it into your strategic workforce planning, it’s critical to also define your operating model intent—do you want to use AI to transform and enhance existing processes, or take the bolder step to ‘re-invent’ your business with AI at its core? Leaders should make a conscious choice: transform current value streams with AI, or fundamentally reimagine the business through an AI-centric operating model
- Avoid the “stuck middle”
Many organisations stall by not committing to a clear AI ambition. They run pilots, but fail to align them with workforce planning. The result? Fragmented efforts, unclear capabilities and missed opportunities.
Success requires:
- A clear purpose: Define your AI ambition and therefore
- Readiness across people and systems: Align your skills, structures and governance to AI goals through your AI operating model design decisions.²
- Focused execution: Ensure your roadmap links ambition to action.
Specific exercises and tools can help move your business from insight to execution:
- Run AI capability maturity assessments
- Map AI ambition to workforce needs
- Design repeatable SWP cycles that evolve with technology and market shifts
- Build for the future, now
To support your chosen AI model, you need more than new tools. You need a new mindset and operating rhythm.
- Embed AI literacy across all levels: From frontline teams to the boardroom, everyone in your organisation must understand how AI impacts their work.
- Dynamic team structures: Ensure you have agile, cross-functional teams that can adapt to evolving tech and business needs.
- Continuous role redesign: Be agile so roles can evolve as AI capabilities and business demands shift.
START SMALL, THINK BIG
You don’t need to do everything at once. Start by embedding AI into existing workflows, enhancing speed, accuracy, and efficiency in areas like finance, HR, and operations.
In this foundational approach, AI acts as a “quiet enabler”2—integrating within current processes to automate routine tasks, embed smarter recommendations into systems like CRMs, deploy chatbots for support, and streamline activities such as recruitment screening. Here, the focus is on laying the groundwork: making workflows faster and leaner, upskilling teams, ensuring technology and data infrastructure are ready, and establishing the first steps in governance for responsible AI use.
By starting with operational enhancement, you build:
- Foundational capability: Teams learn to work with AI in a low-risk environment.
- Organisational confidence: Early wins demonstrate value and build momentum.
- Strategic clarity: Leaders gain insight into where AI can deliver the greatest impact.
Identifying these “no-regret” opportunities, where AI can deliver immediate value, lays the groundwork for broader transformation.
EXAMPLE CASE STUDY
Challenge: The client aimed to accelerate AI adoption across its operating model and workforce but lacked a clear technology strategy and faced internal resistance, particularly around chatbot implementation.
Approach: Gate One conducted rapid discovery through interviews and document analysis, assessed AI maturity using real use cases, and developed targeted tools including a Responsible AI Framework, Use Case Assessment Tool, and Vendor Acceptance Checklist.
Outcomes: The client received a tailored toolkit, gained clarity on AI maturity and growth areas, educated stakeholders on Gen-AI opportunities, and built a strategic communications plan to support AI transition.
Strategic Enablement: This work established a foundation for defining AI ambition, aligning workforce capabilities, and shaping a scalable AI operating model.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
AI operating models are the new blueprint for workforce strategy.
You can’t plan your workforce without understanding your AI ambition. And you can’t realise your AI ambition without a workforce that’s ready to deliver it.
This means your:
- AI ambition must be clearly defined and communicated.
- Operating model must evolve to support that ambition.
- Workforce strategy must be dynamic, data-driven and continuously aligned.
Strategic workforce planning is no longer a static, annual exercise. It’s a living capability that must evolve in lockstep with your AI journey.
WHICH QUADRANT ARE YOU IN? AND WHERE DO YOU WANT TO BE?
The Gartner AI Workforce Impact Matrix helps you locate your current position. But moving to your desired quadrant requires more than insight, it takes action. No matter your stage in workforce planning or operating model transformation, the time to take that step is now.¹
Wherever you are on your AI journey, the next step matters. Whether you’re defining your ambition, aligning your workforce strategy, or building a future-ready organisation—we’re here to help make it real.
We can work together to:
- Clarify your AI ambition and define the operating model to support it
- Align your workforce strategy with the skills, roles and structured needed to deliver
- Build a future-ready organisation that’s agile, adaptive and confident with change.
Source: Gartner® , Adapting Workforce Strategies to Prepare for AI’s Impact on Jobs, 2 April 2025, by Helen Poitevin, Pieter den Hamer, Emily Rose McRae
Gate One, AI Operating Model: A Design Imperative, 2025, by Emily Morrison and Lucie McFarlane
Disclaimers and attribution
GARTNER® is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
