AI is revolutionizing work. You need a human value proposition for the age of AI.

Be aware of AI’s silent impacts

AI is inherently neutral. How it’s used determines whether it supports or erodes an organization’s EVP. But leaders, excited by AI’s promise, may look at the technology through rose-colored glasses, overlooking or minimizing the ways it can undermine people’s work experience. Not acknowledging and addressing these impacts could compromise the human-technology relationship, and in turn the worker-employer relationship, to the detriment of both organizations and their people.

For example, AI often does the easy, rote work, leaving only the hardest tasks for workers. It may reduce human agency (for example, telling a driver which route to drive rather than letting them decide for themselves). It may reduce person-to-person interaction, contributing to loneliness and isolation²—at one hospital, for example, an intelligent robot fills prescriptions that are distributed by pneumatic tubes, leaving pharmacists to work in their cubicles.³

Likewise, studies have shown use of AI can contribute to burnout.⁴ Elizabeth Anne Watkins, a social scientist studying human and machine collaboration at Intel, explains how many workers wonder how they are supposed to spend time not only doing their jobs but also teaching machines how to do their jobs.⁵ And when AI takes on tasks traditionally performed by early career workers, it can lead to a loss of learning opportunities.⁶ Consider medical coding: Companies using AI-based coding systems may need only experienced coders who can audit the system’s decisions, eliminating entry-level roles where people can gain experience.⁷

Both workers and organizations are increasingly concerned about these potential impacts. An informal poll conducted during a Deloitte webinar in December 2024, which included about 3,900 workers and leaders primarily based in the United States, found that the blurring lines between humans and tech, privacy concerns, and the loss of human interaction are looming questions for many (figure 1).

These challenges contrast with the common narrative that AI can be used to make us more productive or make our work easier, among other benefits (figure 2).

Navigating these dynamics will be central to capitalizing on AI’s potential for both workers and business. To that end, organizations’ EVPs should incorporate a clear understanding of AI’s impact on work, workers, and people’s relationship with employers. The need becomes more important by the day, as AI use continues to spread quickly: In particular, generative AI has had a significantly faster adoption rate than previous major technologies like the personal computer and the internet:¹⁹ Global use of gen AI jumped from 55% in 2023 to 75% in 2024.²⁰

People and AI, indivisible?

AI fundamentally changes the relationship between workers and technology, as people work with machines in ever more intertwined, integrated ways—heightening the urgency to revisit the EVP.

The narrative around AI first centered on task replacement through automation. Next, it shifted to augmentation: assisting and extending people’s capabilities. As AI technologies matured, a more nuanced understanding emerged that emphasized the potential for collaboration between humans and AI. In this model, people and AI interact side-by-side as teammates. Most organizations are at the beginning of this stage.

Looking out toward the AI horizon, a new era may be dawning in which the distinctions and boundaries between technology and humans may blur. Consider the ways more human-technology interfaces, such as voice and gesture interfaces, can seamlessly integrate AI into people’s lives and work.²¹ Or how AI increasingly can act as an extension of an individual—for example, embedding the person’s expertise into its algorithms, or becoming digital representations of them that act on their behalf as agents or co-pilots.

“Digital Doug” is one example. Doug was a much-loved automotive company employee who was full of institutional knowledge. Before he retired, he volunteered to be monitored by an algorithm that would learn from his actions. That process birthed Digital Doug, an AI application that makes human Doug’s rare, specialized knowledge available forever and at scale and coaches others in how to use it.²²

We call this growing integration convergence—moving toward the same point and coming closer together or meeting. Its possibility suggests technology could move beyond acting as an enabler, facilitator, and teammate and become woven into the very fabric of the workforce (figure 3).

Getting the human part right in an era of collaboration and potential convergence requires leaders to grapple with thorny questions and important strategic tensions (figure 4), including:

• How do we optimize the ways people work with AI for both business outcomes and human sustainability? 
• How do we balance the need to automate for greater efficiency with the need to augment and collaborate with AI to realize growth and human potential?
• How does AI’s ability to be creative change the worker experience, the worker-organization relationship, and the workforce value proposition?
• How much should we enable workers to redesign work with AI versus managing work redesign from the top down? 

Considerations for creating a human value proposition for the age of AI

The collaboration and possible convergence of AI and people make technology’s promise inextricable from human potential. That means we can’t realize the value of AI without accounting for its impact on the human experience—and we can’t create a compelling human experience without accounting for the impact of AI.

Leaders appear to be paying little attention to this shift, much less augmenting their EVPs to account for it. According to our 2025 Global Human Capital Trends survey  (see “Methodology”), only 52% of respondents view unlocking the potential of blurring human and tech boundaries as very or critically important. To the extent they have considered the people side of AI transformation, most have focused mainly on tactics—exploring use cases, AI adoption and change management, AI fluency, and the disaggregation of jobs into tasks to determine which to assign to machines or humans.²⁵ And while organizations are just beginning to recognize the importance of reinventing their EVP to reflect increased human-machine collaboration, making progress has been challenging (figure 5).

A human value proposition for the age of AI will not be a replacement for the traditional EVP. It will be an evolution of it—an update for a world in which the half-life of skills is shrinking and the boundaries between workers and machines are blurring (figure 6).

Let’s look a little deeper at some examples of what this evolution of an EVP might take into consideration.

How can you share the rewards AI creates with workers?

Organizations are almost six times as likely to receive significant financial benefits from AI when their workers personally derive value from it.²⁶ Our survey found that more than half (56%) of respondents say it is very or critically important to share the rewards that AI creates with workers. Yet, most organizations (77%) aren’t doing anything meaningful about it.

To figure out how to share AI-created rewards, organizations will need to navigate some tricky terrain. To offer one example, should Doug receive ongoing rewards after retirement, since his expertise is now applied at scale through “Digital Doug”?

As you consider this issue, maintain perspective on the people and work at the heart of your business. For example, stock image provider Shutterstock trained its Shutterstock AI image generator on the library it had built over years working with photographers—but only after securing their permission and offering them royalties for the use of licensed images. “It’s about protecting the core of our business, but also respecting the core, which is the artists and the contributors,” said Michael Francello, then director of innovation at Shutterstock, in an interview with Deloitte in 2023.²⁷

Likewise, Waste Management, a North American waste and environmental services organization, is piloting a program that lets drivers stray from AI-optimized routes for various reasons but gives them a financial incentive for generally following the routes and picking up more trash. “We’re … sharing some of the productivity pickup in the form of wages back to the driver,” says one executive in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.²⁸

Appraising performance based on joint human and machine outcomes could help workers share in the wealth AI creates. “We don’t need to evaluate performance based on whether people are using AI,” said another executive to Deloitte. “If you measure outcomes, the means will sort themselves out: The people who use AI will likely get better outcomes and therefore get more rewards.”²⁹

How can AI efficiencies help support work-life balance?

When contemplating sharing rewards, consider whether AI might enable your people to work less. Use of AI made it possible for Canadian law firm The Ross Firm Professional Corporation to implement a four-day work week.³⁰ Many other AI-empowered organizations may follow suit: One Tech.co survey of 1,000 business leaders found that 93% of businesses where AI is critical to business function are considering a four-day work week, compared with 41% that aren’t using AI at all.³¹

How can you use AI to treat everyone like a high potential? 

In our survey, respondents indicated that among workplace practices, performance management was the second-most important area for change, after learning and development, given the growing collaboration between humans and technology. With the help of AI, organizations can give every worker high-potential treatment. AI-powered talent marketplaces can place everyone in stretch assignments, provide everyone with an AI agent that acts as a personal intern, and deliver personalized coaching at scale. For example, Amazon gives workers an AI coach that provides ongoing coaching and feedback based on the experience and evaluations of everyone it has hired.³²

How can you cultivate human capabilities, adaptability, and resilience?

The proliferation of AI increases the need for organizations to develop human capabilities like collaboration and emotional intelligence. For workers, well-honed human capabilities are more important than ever to employability, making their development an increasingly valuable piece of the EVP. According to our 2025 Global Human Capital Trends survey, organizations that prioritize developing human capabilities are nearly twice as likely to have workers that feel their work is meaningful and twice as likely to have better financial and business results.

Financial services organization USAA has intentionally made the development of human capabilities in light of AI part of its EVP. Amala Duggirala, executive vice president and enterprise chief information officer of USAA, explains, “As a result of AI transformation, we have started planning for the skills of the future, and the ways to re-skill our workforce to align with these future skills. This will also involve the employee value proposition shifting to skills that are uniquely human—and moving away from skills that machines can master. Our planning and intent are oriented toward giving employees the opportunities and training to adapt as the work environment changes.”³³

How can we help workers learn from AI and AI learn from workers?

Organizations also need to think about learning as a two-way street: People and AI need to learn from each other. Consider global energy company Repsol, where workers at refineries analyze production options generated by AI, incorporate hard-to-quantify context, and feed their analyses back into the AI system—thereby changing its processes so it gets better at helping workers learn.³⁴

Recognizing this shift, 57% of leaders surveyed in an informal poll during a Deloitte webinar say they need to go beyond AI fluency programs and teach people how to think with machines to create better human and business outcomes.³⁵

As agentic AI— systems that can act autonomously to achieve goals with minimal human intervention—comes onto the scene, organizations may need to go from keeping humans in the loop to keeping humans on the loop, with AI agents consulting humans when they get stuck, like a junior employee might with a senior counterpart.

How can we empower workers to play and experiment with AI?

The winning organizations of the future may be the ones that empower workers to use AI to achieve the highest level of performance: providing their people leading-edge AI tools, encouraging them to play and experiment, and supporting them in learning to use the tools well and responsibly. That process will include education on what AI can and can’t do.³⁶ One study found that generative AI can improve highly skilled workers’ performance by nearly 40% when it is used within the boundary of its capabilities, but using AI outside that boundary causes worker performance to decline by 19%.³⁷

Organizations will want to encourage workers to use AI in new ways and to share what they learn—navigating the strategic tension between control and empowerment. “Here’s what we don’t want to happen,” says Ryan Duguid, former chief evangelist for software company Nintex. According to Forbes, Duguid said, “We don’t want workers who self-automate to keep this to themselves. We want to reward their agility and curiosity.”³⁸

The path to an evolved EVP: Where to start 

Starting with the framework and questions above, organizations will need to continuously reevaluate and enhance their EVPs based on evolutions in technology and their impact on work and workers. Eventually, AI could even change organizations’ fundamental structures. Wharton professor Ethan Mollick observes that today’s structures have been built to accommodate finite human expertise and attention by delegating tasks and establishing layers of management to make decisions. To add expertise or attention, organizations had to add people, demanding a larger hierarchy. In the future, organizations could add expertise and attention without expanding the hierarchy—potentially unlocking worker autonomy like never before.³⁹

How can organizations begin to move toward a new EVP that accounts for how AI is transforming work and the worker-organization relationship?

• Study workers’ use of AI and its silent impacts. Half of leaders in a Deloitte survey say they recognize the need to study how different types of workers work with AI to help them create better human and business outcomes.⁴⁰ They can use any number of methods, including anthropological research, surveys, focus groups, and sentiment analysis; they can even use AI itself to collect data on the effectiveness of human and machine collaboration. Elizabeth Anne Watkins, for example, is on a team of social scientists at Intel who study how AI and human workers interact, including unintended impacts.⁴¹
  
• Share the plan for AI with workers. Transparently spell out how AI will affect work, how the organization will help workers create optimal new ways to work with AI, and how AI will create value for workers as human beings, thereby improving trust and human sustainability.
  

USAA’s CEO, for example, broadly and transparently communicates to all employees about the impacts of AI. These communications are frequently reinforced from line of business leaders, as well from leaders from both HR and IT. All employees also receive introductory AI training to promote awareness and understanding of the technology and its potential.⁴²

• Forge a relationship between the HR and tech functions. Creating a new value proposition for the age of AI requires expertise from both the tech and people domains. In a recent Deloitte survey, 30% of executives said they believe that to create better human and business outcomes, they need their chief information and chief digital officers to join forces with the chief human resources officer to optimize human and machine collaboration and help people work with AI. Another 11% said they believe that the role of chief human resource officer should shift to being “chief human and machine resource officer.”⁴³

Some organizations are experimenting with creating new roles that combine HR and IT expertise such as senior vice president of people eXperience and technology.⁴⁴ Deloitte research reveals that dual-titled executives that span across multiple functions are growing increasingly common in functions like HR.⁴⁵

Others, like USAA, are forging strong relationships between the HR and tech functions, with the chief human resource officer and the HR organization taking on a significant role in strategic workforce planning in light of the impacts of AI and preparing and transitioning the organization as AI and its adoption evolves.⁴⁶

Revising the value proposition you offer your people will likely be critical in the years to come. Over 70% of managers and workers are more likely to join and stay with an organization if its EVP helps them thrive in an AI-driven world. Another 18% say this aspect of the EVP will be important to them in the next three years.⁴⁷

As you redesign jobs, reimagine organizational design, and reconfigure business processes in light of AI, seek to elevate both human and business outcomes. Your AI investment is counting on it—and so are your people.