Creative workers won’t be replaced by AI—but their roles will change to become ‘directors’ managing AI agents, executives say
AI won’t automate creative jobs—but the way workers do them is about to change fundamentally. That’s according to executives from some of the world’s largest enterprise companies who spoke at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco earlier this week.
“Most of us are producers today,” Nancy Xu, vice president of AI and Agentforce at Salesforce, told the audience. “Most of what we do is we take some objective and we say, ‘Okay, my goal is now to spend the next eight hours today to figure out how to chase after this customer, or increase my CSAT score, or to close this amount of revenue.”
With AI agents handling more tasks, Xu said that workers will shift “from producers to more directors.” Instead of asking, “How do I accomplish the goal?” they’ll instead focus on, “What are the goals that I want to accomplish, and then how do I delegate those goals to AI?” she said.
Creative and sales professionals are increasingly anxious about AI automation as tools like chatbots and AI image generators have proved to be good at doing many creative tasks in sectors like marketing, customer service, and graphic design. Companies are already deploying AI agents to take on tasks like handling customer questions, generating marketing content, and assisting with sales outreach.
Pointing to a recent project with electric-vehicle maker Rivian, Elisabeth Zornes, chief customer officer at Autodesk, said that the company’s AI-powered tools enabled Rivian to test designs through digital wind tunnels rather than clay models. “It shaved off about two years of their development cycle,” Zornes said.
As AI takes on some of these lower-level tasks, Zornes said, workers can focus on more creative projects.
“With AI, the floor has been raised, but so has the ceiling,” she added. “We have an opportunity to create more, to be more imaginative.”
The uneven impact of AI
The shift to AI-augmented work may not benefit all workers equally, however.
Salesforce’s Xu said AI’s impact won’t be evenly distributed between high and low performers. “The near-term impact of AI will largely be that we’re going to take the bottom 50 percentile performers inside a role and bring them into the top 50 percentile,” she said. “If you’re in the top 10 percentile, the superstar salespeople, creatives, the impact of AI is actually much less.”
While leaders were keen to emphasize that AI will augment, rather than replace, creative workers, the shift could reshape some traditional career ladders and impact workforce development. If AI agents handle entry-level execution work, companies may need to hire fewer people, and some learning opportunities may disappear for younger workers.
Ami Palan, senior managing director at Accenture Song, said that to successfully implement AI agents, companies may need to change the way they think about their corporate structure and workforce.
“We can build the most robust technology solution and consider it the Ferrari,” she said. “But if the culture and the organization of people are not enabled in terms of how to use that, that Ferrari is essentially stuck in traffic.”
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