The Conversation: 'We Hired an AI — Then Had to Redesign Every Job Around It'

The Setup

We spoke with a VP of People at a 400-person B2B SaaS company that deployed AI writing assistants, code copilots, and customer service bots across the organization in Q3 2025. They asked to remain anonymous because "our board thinks this went smoothly."

reAImagine: What did you expect would happen?

VP: Honestly? We expected a productivity bump. Maybe 20%. Marketing writes faster, engineers ship faster, support resolves tickets faster. That's what the vendor promised. That's what we budgeted for.

reAImagine: And what actually happened?

VP: The productivity bump was real — for about six weeks. Then something weird happened. Output went up, but quality got... homogeneous. Every marketing email sounded the same. Every code review flagged the same kinds of issues. Support responses were fast but felt robotic, even when humans wrote them, because humans were editing AI drafts instead of writing from scratch.

The Uncomfortable Middle

reAImagine: How did the team react?

VP: Split down the middle. Half the team loved it — "I get to do the interesting work now." The other half felt deskilled. One senior copywriter told me, "I used to be a writer. Now I'm an editor of mediocre AI copy. That's not what I signed up for."

reAImagine: What did you do?

VP: We had to redesign almost every role. Not eliminate them — redesign them. We created what we call "AI-forward" job descriptions that explicitly define which tasks are AI-led, which are human-led, and which are collaborative. It took four months. It was the hardest organizational design work I've ever done.

The Lesson

reAImagine: What would you tell other People leaders?

VP: Don't deploy AI and hope the org adapts. The org won't adapt — it'll splinter. Some people will over-rely on AI and lose their edge. Others will resist it and fall behind. You need to actively design the new way of working. And you need to do it with your people, not to them.

The technology is the easy part. The human architecture is everything.