Organizations will need AI and robot relations departments

Various sectors are deploying artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, including manufacturing, finance, transportation, retail, defense, education, and health care. These industries are introducing AI assistants and agents, robotic equipment, cobots (collaborative robots), and automated software on their online platforms, in their products and services, and for backend operations. The widespread adoption of these digital and physical tools calls for new thinking about how workers are treated and the way organizations operate.

Experts recently echoed this message at the Brookings Institution’s 15th annual John Hazen White Forum on Public Policy, stressing the striking workforce ramifications of adopting emerging technologies. These changes will necessitate creating new types of AI jobs, introducing robot relations departments, redefining the nature of work, and developing a new social contract—demonstrating that each of these developments is going to require substantial readjustment of current structures, operations, and policies.

New AI jobs

Jobs in an AI-focused world are beginning to change. There will be redefinitions of existing jobs and new types of positions created. Some old jobs will go away and never be filled again. Workers are going to need new skills and types of experience to be hired for these new roles.

One example of a new position is AI agent management. Many organizations are incorporating AI assistants, agents, and chatbots into their operations that perform basic administrative tasks, transactions, and communications. Yet a number of firms are finding it difficult to incorporate AI agents into their current structures. They need staff who are skilled at understanding how these agents work, who have significant subject-matter knowledge, and who can work with non-technical people who are not digitally adept. Figuring out how to deploy and manage agents will require new expertise in many organizations.

In the manufacturing and defense sectors, fewer shopfloor workers may be needed, but new and different robot specialists will be important to oversee robots and physical AI. In fact, companies are already deploying more sophisticated robots with sensors and cameras. They no longer are just mechanical objects that move around and collect packages in warehouses, but reasoning entities that “learn” and adapt to their surroundings. As they become more advanced, someone will have to manage robots to make sure they are performing adequately and doing what management requires.

In the near term, collaborative robots and AI tools will work in close conjunction with human beings and augment worker performance. Such robots can act autonomously and take over dirty, dangerous, or dull jobs, thereby freeing humans for more creative or high-level tasks. But to enable that, we will need supervisors who understand cobots and help employees work effectively with them.

In these and other endeavors, companies will have to hire more people who are skilled at human-computer interfaces. Leaders can’t just tell workers to incorporate AI agents in their work given the complications in terms of costs, cybersecurity, intellectual property, compute time, and personal privacy. Figuring out how to adjust work plans and internal operations will be a major adoption challenge for many firms.

It is important that organizations get these shifts right; the way firms incorporate technology will greatly affect the pace of adoption and how comfortable individuals feel with new tools. Mobile phones became ubiquitous, for example, because of their easy interfaces and speed with which people could perform various tasks. Users didn’t need to be a computer science major to take advantage of embedded algorithms and digital functions. Now with AI and robotics, human-oriented skills will be essential. Above all, organizations will need design-and-process workers who can develop usable interfaces that make it easy to use AI agents and assistants.

Reconceptualizing HR and the need for AI and robot relations departments

At the same time, the whole “human resources” activities of organizations will need to change rapidly. Right now, every organization has an HR department that manages staff relationships, worker issues, and training functions. These are the traditional labor-management activities needed in any large organization. Workers require information, have questions or complaints, and need training on how to do their jobs.

With AI and cobots, however, businesses will need to supplement HR with robot relations (RR). The latter activity will need to focus on the way humans in the organization interact with AI assistants and agents, robots, cobots, physical AI, and chatbots. These functions go well beyond current HR functions and will require new types of capabilities and different types of people to oversee staff-computer relationships.

The prior HR focus on resolving tensions between individual employees will give way to a focus on figuring out how to address human resistance to technological change, dealing with people’s inevitable frustrations with digital assistants, and determining which tasks can be automated. Organizations will need to merge HR and IT departments to have the right mix of skills for the coming deployments.

In the emerging AI-based world, employee concerns no longer will center on fellow workers but on interactions with AI agents, cobots, and large language models. HR staff will have to deal with complaints that algorithms are unfair or biased and that job descriptions and pay do not reflect people’s actual work with robots.

Redefining work and developing a new social contract

In the longer run, society is going to need to redefine work to include activities that currently are not considered jobs. If AI and robots take slots, especially at the entry level, there is a real risk unemployment will rise and create social unrest. Many individuals who previously held positions working in organizations may have to undertake activities that benefit society but are not currently considered “jobs.”

That includes activities such as parenting, caregiving, and artistic endeavors, which are often unpaid or lack the benefits associated with traditional employment. In the future, we may have to redefine work to include these activities and figure out ways to compensate people. The virtue of this is not only will such a shift compensate people undertaking vital tasks, but it would keep unemployment down to more politically acceptable levels.

Rapidly changing technologies will alter the way we think about work, employee relations, pay, benefits, and job retraining. Many of our existing systems and structures are derived from an industrial era and do not address worker concerns arising in the digital world. It is vital that we think seriously about these issues so that workers have the assistance they need for a smooth transition to digitalization.

We also will need to think creatively about public policy. Just as the United States did a century ago when industrialization encouraged the introduction of innovations such as Social Security, worker compensation, mass education, and infrastructure investment, we need to consider new ideas to smooth emerging forms of technology adoption. Such ideas might include a 30-hour work week, basic incomes, lifelong learning support, and sovereign wealth funds as a way to handle public investment. Many current policies are inadequate for the workforce challenges ahead, and a number of them do not address the particular concerns workers have. Major technological transformation requires substantial reforms in how we think about our social contract with one another.