As businesses rush to adopt AI, many of the most pressing questions organizations are asking are focused on people. Should systems be designed as human-in-the-loop or human-in-the-lead? How should you tackle your staff’s fears about AI-driven layoffs? How do you make sure your employees work seamlessly with your AI agents?
One answer is to have an AI-people strategy which establishes the best way of working, but most leaders don’t know where to start. At WPP, the Fortune 500 Europe advertising giant, the response has been to establish a role dedicated to solving this thorny problem. Enter Dr. Laura Weis, WPP’s head of human-AI strategy and transformation.
“I have a lot of beef around the narrative with AI,” says Weis. “While some people say AI makes you lazy or rots your brain, others claim it makes you smarter. That narrative is not particularly helpful. It’s a bit like saying a spoon will make you fat. Don’t blame the spoon and don’t blame the technology.”
Instead, Weis argues for understanding both the power and limitations of AI and people—and designing work accordingly. Here’s her six-step playbook on how to get started.
“We need to stop looking at AI and talent in parallel and understand how they intersect,” says Weis. “Most organizations have a people strategy, and most organizations will have an AI tech strategy, but if they don’t connect in a really meaningful and intentional way, you still won’t get much value from them.”
Leaders need to think about their workforce holistically—this includes the digital, agentic workforce as well as the human one. To remove the silos that make so many AI implementation programs harder, leaders must start from scratch and design an organizational structure that allows each member of this blended workforce to realize their full potential. This also means all members of the executive team need oversight of the people strategy—not just the CHRO.
Conversations about AI often come back to efficiency and how processes can be made faster or cheaper. But Weis says this is the wrong approach.
“When we talk about value, the predominant narrative is efficiency and faster outputs,” she says. “That’s not going to give you a competitive advantage.”
Instead, she says the focus should be on doing things differently, scrapping the idea of how work currently gets done and exploring new opportunities for growth, innovation, and revenue-generation. “It’s about creating that edge and sharpening that edge, innovating and improving quality using AI.” When everyone else is focused on executing the same things at a quicker pace, real value comes from thinking differently.
There is no doubt that AI can save businesses time, but Weis believes many organizations falter because they fail to think strategically about how to utilize the time saved.
“AI gives us speed but, much more importantly, it gives us space,” she says. “In a phase of ambiguity, like the one we’re in, we tend to focus on what we can reduce, but the data suggests that AI is less suited to the compression of work than to the expansion of work.”
In Weis’s view, leaders should look at how the technology can allow a business to do things it has never done before, rather than simply replacing what it was already doing. To best achieve this, the time that is saved as a result of using AI should be ringfenced for exploration. “Use that space to think, to connect what hasn’t been connected before, to bring together ideas and people which have never been brought together,” she says.
Although some companies have opted to reduce headcount in response to AI’s increased efficiencies, Weis advises business leaders to redesign roles rather than eliminate them.
“We need to be really clear what AI can do, but also what humans are good at that AI is not,” says Weis. “Leaders have to ask: where is the judgment, where is the discernment, where is the decision-making, where is the emotional intelligence? All these are strengths AI does not have.”
This also requires leaders to rethink what is considered ‘high performance’. One risk of implementing AI is what Weis terms “glorified busyness” where employees are working at greater speed but not necessarily generating greater value. True high performers, she argues, are not merely those who “do a lot of things fast.” Instead, a high performer is often “the person who can completely rethink things, who is creative, who can bring together people, translate and organize plans, and create coherence.”
An AI-people strategy should explore ways to utilize the technology to allow high performers to do more of what they do best, either by removing mundane tasks or by giving them the tools and time to explore new ideas.
As well as rethinking notions of ‘high performance’, leaders must take a critical look at the structure and functioning of their teams.
“AI is an amplifier,” says Weis. “If you have teams that feel psychologically safe, that have a clear decision-making structure, that have the right expertise, then AI will multiply that value. If you put AI on top of teams that are unhealthy, where critical thinking isn’t rewarded, where there’s not enough space for them to pivot because they’re so under pressure, then it’ll just create more noise and frustration.”
“When we talk about value, the predominant narrative is efficiency and faster outputs”
Dr. Laura Weis, WPP’s head of human-AI strategy and transformation
Without a strategy, AI implementation is unlikely to yield positive results. Weis advises business leaders to establish workplace cultures which reward different types of thinking, and which allow for different ways of working, before rolling out new technologies.
To find true success with an AI-people strategy, leaders must be just as strict about where AI should and should not be used. “Make sure you’re not taking the joy out of work,” says Weis. “At the moment, we tend to automate too much for applause rather than relief.”
By this she means that AI disproportionately affects tasks which are associated with autonomy and creativity and which have historically been a source of pride for employees, such as writing creative briefs or articles, brainstorming new ideas, or design work.
“The only way to keep people engaged and give them a sense of identity is through purpose,” says Weis. When it comes to setting out where AI will not be used, leaders must make sure this is a reflection of the things that they value within their organization.
The key is for leaders to remember that AI is not the transformation in and of itself. Insightful leadership and work redesign are what will make the difference. Those leaders layering technology onto outdated workforce practices will find that it unlocks neither real value nor a competitive advantage. In Weis’s mind, the companies that win with AI won’t be the ones that adopt it fastest, but the ones that rethink work most deeply.
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