Matthew Thomas is a highly regarded people and transformation executive with more than 25 years of experience leading workforce strategy, organisational change and culture across local government, banking, commercial enterprise and higher education. As Chief People Officer at the City of Stirling, he is responsible for shaping a contemporary people agenda that strengthens organisational capability, leadership effectiveness and employee experience.
The workplace has already been rewritten. Not gradually. Not politely. In real time. Work now happens across screens, platforms, prompts, dashboards and digital agents that are increasingly embedded in how decisions are made, how service is delivered and how people experience their day. The old debate about whether technology belongs at work is over. The real question for today’s leaders is far more consequential: will we use this moment to simply digitise legacy ways of working or will we redesign work itself to be more human, more adaptive and more valuable?
That is the disruptive opportunity in front of us. AI is not just another tool in the corporate toolkit. It is a structural shift in how work is organised, how capability is scaled and how capacity is created. Progressive organisations will need to stop protecting outdated workflows or clinging to industrial-era assumptions about visibility, control and hierarchy. Instead, they will respond by asking better questions about trust, autonomy, judgement, inclusion and design. In that sense, this is a work redesign story, and employee experience sits at the centre of it.
Redesigning Work, Not Just Digitising It
Current global research makes the scale of this shift impossible to ignore. The World Economic Forum reports that broadening digital access is expected to be the most transformative trend shaping business by 2030, while AI and information processing, robotics and automation continue to redraw jobs and skill demand. It also identifies technological literacy, creative thinking, resilience, flexibility and agility as increasingly critical capabilities for the workforce of the near future. It further notes that nearly 40 per cent of skills required on the job are expected to change by 2030, with skill gaps now one of the most significant barriers to business transformation. That should be a signal to every executive team: the organisations that thrive will not be those that merely automate faster, but those that build a workforce and culture ready to operate at a different altitude, where employee experience is strengthened through better access, better support and more meaningful work.
Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index pushes the conversation even further. Its research, drawing on survey data from 31,000 workers across 31 countries, LinkedIn labour market trends and trillions of productivity signals, points to the rise of what it calls “intelligence on tap” and the emergence of human-agent teams that will fundamentally reshape knowledge work. It argues that a new type of organisation is emerging: one that is AI-operated but human-led, built around on-demand intelligence, flatter structures and work that is organised more dynamically around outcomes than static roles. This is a powerful framing for People leaders. The future of work is no longer about adding digital tools around the edges of existing roles. It is about redesigning work around a new reality where intelligence can be scaled on demand, routine effort can be delegated, and human contribution becomes more focused on judgement, creativity, connection and stewardship. Done well, that shift does not just improve efficiency; it improves the employee experience by giving people more space to contribute where they add the greatest value.
This is why the most contemporary Chief People Officers are not treating AI as an IT deployment or a policy annex. They are treating it as one of the biggest organisational design challenges of the decade. Because once technology becomes part of the environment in which work is experienced, the People agenda changes. We are no longer just shaping culture through leadership behaviour, policy and programmes. We are shaping it through workflows, system logic, digital interfaces, algorithmic decisions and the everyday architecture of work itself. That is a materially different mandate. It requires People leaders to work beyond traditional HR boundaries and become active architects of how work is structured, where decisions sit, how accountability is distributed and what capabilities the organisation will need next. Above all, it requires them to ensure that employee experience is one of its primary design criteria rather than being a downstream consequence of transformation.
That means moving beyond digitising inefficient processes and calling it transformation. Too many organisations are still layering AI onto workflows that were never well designed in the first place. They automate approvals no one needs, accelerate reporting that no one uses and increase the volume of activity without improving the quality of outcomes. Genuine transformation is more radical than that. It asks what work should stop, what work should be simplified, what work should be owned by technology and what work should remain unmistakably human. It also forces a harder conversation about management itself. In a world of on-demand intelligence, the value of leadership shifts away from supervision and towards clarity, prioritisation, ethics, context and judgement. The test of whether this redesign is working will be simple: does it leave employees with a better experience of work, including less friction, more focus and greater capacity to do meaningful work well?
Why Employee Experience Must Be Central to AI Adoption
Of course, disruption without design becomes noise. Employees do not experience transformation as a strategy paper; they experience it in moments. They experience it when a new system removes friction instead of adding clicks. When an AI assistant saves an hour rather than creating uncertainty. When flexibility is genuinely enabled rather than symbolically endorsed. When decision-making becomes more transparent, rather than being more opaque. When digital tools make access easier for frontline, remote or dispersed workers instead of reinforcing old inequalities. The question is not whether disruption is happening. It is whether leaders are mature enough to shape it into something that improves working life rather than fragments it.
This is where the conversation about productivity needs to mature. For years, organisations have measured output in ways that reward responsiveness, volume and visible busyness. But the digital workplace has exposed how fragile that model really is. Constant meetings, endless messaging, duplicated systems and fragmented attention do not create high performance. They create cognitive overload. AI can help, but only if leaders use it to eliminate low-value effort rather than simply accelerate it. The opportunity is not to make already overwhelmed employees move faster. It is to redesign work so that people can focus on contribution, problem-solving and service in the moments that matter most. In employee experience terms, that means creating work that feels more sustainable, more focused and ultimately more rewarding.
That matters because the risks are real. The OECD has highlighted both the opportunities and tensions emerging in AI-enabled workplaces. Its work shows that four in five workers surveyed say AI has improved their performance at work and three in five say it has increased their enjoyment of work. At the same time, workers continue to express concern about surveillance, biased decisions, increased work intensity, wage pressure and unequal access to digital capability. This is the tension mature leaders must hold. Neither slowing innovation to the pace of organisational anxiety nor pursuing efficiency with no regard for trust is the solution. The answer is to build human-centred guardrails strong enough to let innovation move with confidence.
Trust, Governance and the Conditions for Responsible Innovation
That requires more than an ethics statement. It requires governance that is practical, visible and lived. Employees need to know where AI is being used, what data informs it, what decisions remain human, how exceptions are handled and where accountability sits when outcomes go wrong. Just as importantly, they need genuine participation in how new tools are introduced. Trust does not come from polished launch messaging. It comes from transparency, capability-building and the evidence that worker experience has been taken seriously in the design of the change. If organisations ignore that, they risk creating a workplace that is technically advanced but culturally brittle. If they get it right, they create an employee experience that feels safer, fairer and more trusted.
Skills therefore become a strategic fault line. If nearly 40 per cent of job skills are expected to change by 2030, then digital fluency cannot remain the domain of specialists or early adopters. It becomes a condition of organisational resilience and, increasingly, a condition of inclusion. The risk is not simply that some employees will be slower to adopt new tools. The deeper risk is that organisations create a two-speed workforce: one group with access to AI, confidence, opportunity and influence, and another that is left navigating change with less support and less visibility. Contemporary People leadership must treat that as a culture issue, not just a training issue. A stronger employee experience depends on people feeling equally equipped to participate in the future of work, rather than excluded by it.
For Chief People Officers, that means stepping into a more disruptive mandate. It means challenging organisational habits that confuse busyness with performance. It means redesigning roles around value, not volume. It means treating digital fluency as a condition of inclusion, not a nice-to-have. It means ensuring hybrid work is not managed as a compromise but designed as a capability. It means partnering with technology, operations and governance leaders to redesign the operating model itself rather than waiting to react to decisions made elsewhere. And it means being explicit that the future of work won’t be led by the organisations with the most technology, but by those with the clearest philosophy for how technology should serve people. At its best, that philosophy should produce a better employee experience at every level of the organisation.
The Leadership Shift Required for the Next Era of Work
There is also a broader mindset shift required from executive teams. AI should not be seen simply as a lever for efficiency or cost reduction, although it will influence both. It should be understood as a catalyst for rethinking how public value, customer service, organisational capacity and employee contribution are created. The institutions that benefit most will be those prepared to let go of outdated assumptions: that knowledge must sit in hierarchy, that physical presence equals commitment, that management is primarily about control, or that productivity is best measured by activity rather than impact. Those assumptions were under pressure before AI. Now they are becoming liabilities. The more important question is whether leaders are willing to use this shift to create an employee experience that is more empowering, more inclusive and better aligned to how people can do their best work.
The most important leadership question now is not whether work will continue to change. It will. Nor is it whether AI will alter jobs, teams and decision-making. It already is. The real question is whether we are bold enough to use this inflection point to build a better workplace than the one we inherited. One with less friction and more focus. Less administration and more contribution. Less hierarchy and more access. Less fear and more capability. Less process theatre and more meaningful work. That is the real opportunity of AI at work. Not to make people smaller in the system, but to make work better for the people inside it, with employee experience improved not incidentally, but intentionally.
For organisations willing to lead, this is a rare moment. Moments like this do not come often: where technology, workforce expectation and operating model change collide so visibly that leaders have permission to rethink the fundamentals. The temptation will be to respond tactically to pilot here, automate there and preserve as much of the old model as possible. But the stronger play is to be more ambitious. To ask what a genuinely contemporary workplace should feel like, how leadership should evolve when intelligence is abundant, and what responsibilities come with building systems that shape people’s daily working lives. That is the challenge now. And it is also the opportunity. The future of work will not be defined by the tools we buy, but by the courage we show in redesigning work around what people and technology can achieve together.