People: your greatest asset

As organisations respond to external challenges, drive opportunities and focus on risks, technology is critical to cut through the complexity. The people in your organisation are even more critical as change is driven through leadership, buy-in and focus. Risks, including technology risks, are managed through a range of measures but critical thinking underpins everything.   

Attracting, incentivising and managing talent is more important than ever. Organisational design, role clarity, and strategic workforce planning and management can be the difference between success and failure in agentic AI implementations. 

We believe there are a number of substantive opportunities for Australian corporates to increase the value of their most important asset: people. Key areas of opportunity include:  

  • Understanding the truth of the culture you have today and what you need for the future including the development and constant reinforcement of critical thinking 

  • Making sure that people considerations are paramount in any AI enabled transformation or redesign

Executing on these opportunities is not straightforward. Our KSIB team, combining deep consulting and executive experience, works with executive teams to cut through to identify truly meaningful people initiatives that you can implement. This has to be done through the focus of business leadership as well as human resources leadership. 

Our insights on key people considerations underpinning the transition to an AI-enabled environment are outlined below: 

KSIB People Transition

KSIB Insights

People transition considerations

Key people transition issues that need to be considered

  • As AI agentic enterprise level solutions are implemented, considering how to define new functions and activities for the critical human led roles is essential.
  • KSIB follows the mantra of "Human led, AI powered" to make sure key processes or value chains are considered systematically in terms of the roles that must or should be fulfilled by humans, and where AI tooling can replace human activity.
  • Understanding current activities being performed in a process and redesigning these activities for the AI enabled world can take time. KSIB has partnered with Beamible, a platform that enables role clarity and future state redesign through scenario planning (measure many times before taking action) to assist with this transition work.
  • A phased approach to transition and functional changes is likely to be needed. Using a platform like Beamible reduces time and cost, as once data is loaded, scenario analysis is simple.
  • Significant skills changes will be required as the new operating and control environments evolve. Key human roles will employ creativity, critical thinking and professional scepticism.
  • New risk management and operational roles will be created, some old roles will be redundant, and many existing roles will need to adapt to the new environment.

KSIB's view on the essential elements

  1. Plan carefully and efficiently using tooling not spreadsheets.
  2. Develop an upskilling curriculum that focuses not only on technology but also on critical thinking and professional scepticism.
  3. Phase your transition so you are developing new process muscle and upskilling as you proceed.
  4. Keep the innovation system in place (creativity and risk management are required).

KSIB has partnered with Beamible, a work design platform, to help clients re-design their workforce (both human and agentic) as they transform. The Beamible platform enables clients to understand what is currently happening in their organisation at both a functional and individual level and to perform scenario analysis as changes are proposed. The methodology includes capturing the current state, identifying inefficiencies, missed opportunities and potential risks, performing scenario analysis, designing the future state and then making changes. Implementation does not proceed until opportunities and risks are carefully thought through. This includes designing and containing roles for agents with clear risk mitigants and controls as discussed in AI Unleashed.

To learn more about Beamible, visit https://beamible.com.