Your Job Isn’t Being Stolen. It’s Being Deconstructed

In this piece, Preethy Suresh, Founder & CEO, Ignition Point Ventures, reflects on why fear around AI is misplaced, and why organisations must redesign work itself instead of expecting technology alone to deliver transformation.

| Written by Preethy Suresh

Deloitte published something earlier this year that I keep coming back to. 84% of companies deploying AI have not redesigned jobs or the nature of work itself around it. Not small companies with no budget. Not companies that are still on the fence about AI. Companies that are actively using it and still have not changed how work actually happens.

Let’s sit with that for a second, because I think we have all gotten so caught up in the debate about whether AI will take our jobs that we have completely missed what is actually going wrong. Technology is not the problem. The operating model is.

FOBO Is a Symptom. The Real Problem Is Ambiguity.

There is a term researchers are using now, FOBO. Fear of Becoming Obsolete. Mercer’s data shows that fear of job loss has risen sharply from 28% in 2024 to 40% in 2026, and three in four employees say they do not feel confident using AI in their day to day work. I am not surprised by any of that. But I do not think we are diagnosing it correctly.

When I see those numbers, I do not see a workforce that is incapable or resistant. I see a workforce that has been handed new tools with no clarity on what they are supposed to do with them. Fear does not grow from technology. It grows from ambiguity. From walking into work every day not knowing whether the thing that makes you valuable still makes you valuable.

And the ambiguity is coming from the top.

I have lost count of the number of CEOs who have told me they want to implement AI across their business. My first question is always the same. “Okay, but what do you want it to do?” And I almost never get a straight answer. 

What I get instead is a version of the same anxiety their employees are feeling. Fear of falling behind competitors, fear of missing cost savings, fear of walking into a board meeting and being asked why they have not moved faster.

FOBO is not just an employee problem. It is running all the way up the org chart, and it is shaping decisions that affect thousands of people.

When fear drives your AI strategy, you do not get transformation. You get an expensive mess that nobody knows how to clean up.

I am not worried about AI taking jobs. I am worried about organisations refusing to redesign work, and that is what creates fear, waste, and missed opportunity.

The Job Description Was Already Dead

Before we even get to AI, we need to talk about the thing AI is supposedly replacing, because it was already broken.

When was the last time you looked at your job description and thought, yes, that is exactly what I do? Job descriptions have been vague by design for years. Vague enough to be flexible, specific enough to protect the business legally. What they almost never do is describe the actual work. The real tasks. The things that take up your Tuesday afternoon.

That gap matters more than ever now, because you cannot redesign work you have not mapped. And most organisations have absolutely no idea what their people are actually doing at the task level. They know the role. They do not know the work.

So start there. Take any role, let us use Customer Success Manager since it is a common one, and instead of thinking about it as a job, break it down into everything it actually involves. Ticket triage. Renewal calls. Escalation management. Data entry. Relationship check ins. Product feedback. Churn analysis. Somewhere between 25 and 35 distinct tasks, depending on the company. Each one is different in terms of frequency, judgment, and business impact.

When you see it laid out like that, the path forward becomes obvious in a way it never is when you are looking at a job title.

Three Buckets. That’s the Whole Framework.

Once you can see the tasks, sorting them is not complicated.

Automate. Some tasks are purely mechanical. Scheduling, data entry, status updates, generating standard reports. There is no judgment involved. No emotional nuance. These drain human energy and produce nothing that could not be done faster and more accurately by a machine. Automate them and do not feel conflicted about it.

Enhance. Some tasks need a human in the loop but benefit enormously from AI doing the groundwork first. Drafting content, synthesising research, modelling financial scenarios, preparing for a difficult client conversation. The human brings judgment. The AI brings speed and a starting point. Neither alone produces the best outcome, but together they are powerful. These are your co pilot workflows.

Elevate. Then there are tasks where the human presence is the point. Negotiation. Holding a difficult conversation with a client who is about to walk away. Making a strategic call when the data points in two different directions and someone has to decide. Building trust over months and years. AI is not coming for these, and even if capability was not the constraint, the value exists because a human is doing them.

Here is the part that frustrates me most about how organisations are approaching this right now. That first bucket, the mechanical work, should be buying people back hours they can reinvest in the third bucket. Deeper relationships. Bigger thinking. More complex work.

Instead, those hours disappear into poorly run meetings and bureaucratic noise, because nobody redesigned the operating model to capture them. The automation happened. The liberation did not.

So the real question for every employee and every leader is not whether AI will take your job. It is whether your organisation is intentional enough to use the time AI frees up for something that actually matters.

This Lands in HR’s Lap Whether We Like It or Not

I will be honest. HR built the job descriptions. HR owns workforce architecture. If companies are deploying AI without redesigning work around it, that is partly a leadership failure, yes, but it is also a function failure.

The opportunity sitting in front of HR right now is historic. Not to manage the human side of an IT rollout. Not to run change management workshops. To lead a fundamental redesign of how work gets done. That means understanding tasks at the smallest level, being honest about what machines do better, and rebuilding structures that put humans where human intelligence actually counts.

That is not a support function. That is the most strategically important work HR could be doing right now, and most functions are not doing it.

The organisations pulling ahead are not necessarily using better AI. They have understood that the tool is only as powerful as the system it operates in. They are rebuilding from the ground up. What work looks like, how teams form around it, and where human and machine capability meet.

Everyone else is still calling it transformation while the operating model stays exactly the same.

HR has a choice to make. Lead the redesign, or spend the next decade explaining why the investment did not deliver. There really is not a third option.