AI Proof your Career - job functions HR AHRI

AI Proof Your Career 1 – Job functions vs Job Description – Australia HR

ByLaurel Papworth

I wanted this piece to reframe “AI-proofing your career” away from fear of job loss and toward understanding how work is actually structured. Jobs are not single roles – they are collections of functions, often called “task bundles”. AI doesn’t replace whole jobs neatly; it compresses repetitive, procedural functions while expanding areas that require human…

I wanted this piece to reframe “AI-proofing your career” away from fear of job loss and toward understanding how work is actually structured. Jobs are not single roles – they are collections of functions, often called “task bundles”. AI doesn’t replace whole jobs neatly; it compresses repetitive, procedural functions while expanding areas that require human judgement, context, and accountability.

Using examples like IKEA’s redeployment of customer service staff into higher-value interior design roles, this shows how organisations are already shifting from task execution to outcome ownership. Customer service procedures were compressed, while a new interior design bureau expanded – generating over $1 billion in revenue. As an employee, you are encouraged to map your own work into two categories: functions that can be delegated to AI, and functions where human judgement must remain.

AI-managed functions (compression)Human-led functions (expansion)
Answering routine queries (order status, FAQs)Handling complex or emotionally charged interactions
Summarising customer history and interactionsInterpreting context and making judgement calls
Drafting standard responses and emailsDe-escalation, empathy, and relationship repair
Routing tickets and prioritising queuesDeciding when to override process or policy
Generating reports on trends and common issuesIdentifying patterns and redesigning customer experience

Typical CSR split between AI functions vs Human functions. For the AI Handler role.

The core shift is from “doing tasks” to “owning outcomes.” This is where agency and leadership begin. Rather than waiting to be restructured, you can proactively redesign your role – working alongside AI as a manager of systems while retaining responsibility for decisions that matter. If you’re not auditing AI, someone else is. If you’re not handling AI, someone else is. The opportunity is to stay inside that loop – and to AI-proof your career by thinking strategically.

AI Proof Your Career – Employee tips – Australia HR and employment

Transcript of AI Proof Your Career – Job functions vs Job Description

Hello, my name’s Laurel Papworth and I mentor companies and government organisations through AI and emerging technology change. This video is about how to AI-proof your career as an employee. So it’s an employee-focused one. I wanted to make it personal. What does it mean for you and your job and what can you do? As the world is changing around you. AI restructuring isn’t just about cuts. It’s also about, uh, compression and expansion. And this AI accordion is where AI comes in and compresses certain layers in the organisation, but expands others. So some areas compress, some areas expand. And completely new greenfields are opened as well. [00:00:56.27]

Take IKEA. They introduced a chatbot called Billy, I guess after their famous Billy bookcase, that replaced a lot of functionality within the customer service field. So anything that required simple lookups like, when will my delivery arrive? Or what’s my order number? Things like that. An AI chatbot can take over. Instead of getting rid of hundreds, in fact, I think it was over 1,000 staff, they took that staff and redeployed them to a new area called the Interior Design Advisory. So these customer service reps had deep domain knowledge about design and creating bedrooms and lounge rooms. And so they put them in with AI, with tools, AI tools to help them, to help design spaces for customers. So it was a new area, interior design, made over $1 billion. It’s very clever. It repositioned their staff, allowed AI to take over certain functionality and then put the staff into an outcome-focused area, compressed, Customer service expanded interior design and allowed human value to shift to where human value was needed. [00:02:20.00]

So here’s what I recommend for you as an employee. Take your job, think of it as a series of job functions, like a, a, a functional workflow, and split those functions into two columns. The first column is the one you think is going to be compressed. Things you do that are repetitive that an AI can do. Summarising the weekly report, putting together a to-do list, anything that you think an AI probably could do with you having oversight of what it’s doing. You are the manager of the AI. [00:02:57.04]

And then the second one is where you stop and think, where do I place in judgement? Like, When do I stop and think, oh, I need to think about this one? Because in all likelihood, that’s the one you don’t want the AI to optimise for. You need human judgement. So that can be context, creativity, synthesis. Did I say judgement? Accountability. If an AI can escalate something, you can set it up to do that. So this isn’t things you escalate to your manager. This is the stuff where you stop and you make a judgement call and then you go ahead. So the first column is the procedural functions. Anything that’s repetitive, anything that you think AI can compress, anything you’re happy to shift to AI goes in the first column. And then the second one is the additional skills that the human has, which is human value-based. That’s the bit that’s going to expand. [00:03:58.09]

Once you see your job as a series of workflow functions and some of them you’re going to manage in AI and some of them you’re going to step in as the, as the leader in the space, you now have agency. You’re going to act with agency, not just as a worker, but as a leader because you’re taking responsibility for the outcomes. So that shift from doing the task to owning the outcome, that’s the shift into leadership. It’s where leadership starts. And it’s also how you stay relevant to an organisation that’s changing around you. Anyway, I wish you well in your AI explorations. Don’t wait to be restructured. Start restructuring what you do. And remember, stay human. I’ll see you in the next video. Thank you.

Resources for Human Resources in Australia:

Part 2 of “AI Proof Your Career” on surviving corporate restructures due to AI will be out shortly (April 2026).