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

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 leaders at medium and large organizations found that 39% had conducted layoffs as a result of AI—and 55% of those admitted to making wrong decisions about the redundancies. And the reversals are expected to multiply: Gartner predicts that by 2027, half of the companies that attributed job cuts to AI will be rehiring people to do similar work under different titles. When firing is closely followed…