Strategic Workforce Planning in the Age of AI

AI is redefining the future of work and Strategic Workforce Planning is no longer optional it’s mission critical. If we want to prepare our organisations and our people for the AI era, we can’t just focus on how work changes. We have to plan for how workers grow. This is the opportunity for impact SWP was made for!

It used to be that every generation, a tech breakthrough came along that doesn’t just speed things up it kicks out the bottom rung of the career ladder. Think about the bank teller, the print room apprentice, the switchboard operator. These weren’t glamorous jobs, but they were crucial. They were how people learned the business. Tellers grew into branch managers. Print room kids became creative directors. Switchboard operators moved into telecom leadership.

These roles were both entry points and development engines. But as technology swept them away, we didn’t just lose functions we started losing futures. Without that grounding, the path onwards and upwards was broken.

Now AI is doing the same thing only faster, and everywhere. And if we’re not planning upstream, we’re not just risking delivery gaps. We’re starving the system of the very thing that makes strategy executable: not just roles, but the minds we grow.

We’re now facing a new kind of disruption only this time, the machine isn’t on the factory floor or in the field. It’s in the cloud, embedded in our workflows, showing up in tools we use every day. The shift is global, instant, and digital. And unlike past technologies, AI isn’t just replacing tasks it’s reflecting us. Today’s AI is a mirror, trained on our collective output. It doesn’t just accelerate our work it depends on our continued advancement to evolve. If we lose the pathways that grow expertise, we’re not just weakening our workforce we’re starving the very system AI learns from.

The Disappearance of the First Rung

AI is already disrupting the base of the workforce pyramid. According to the IMF, nearly 40% of global jobs are exposed to AI. In advanced economies, that number climbs to 60%, with entry-level and routine cognitive roles the most vulnerable. Goldman Sachs recently projected that 300 million jobs globally could be affected by generative AI, with administrative and office support roles among the first to feel it.

These are the jobs that used to be the proving ground for, I suspect, you dear reader.

Think of the HR coordinator, the junior marketing analyst, the data-entry assistant, the call center rep, the paralegal doing document review. These roles weren’t just about tasks they were developmental. They were where people learned industry language and got exposed to cross-functional work. This is where YOU made your first career bet.

AI now does many of those tasks better, faster, and without needing a benefits package and manager motivation. And while that’s a clear productivity win, it’s also a succession planning crisis in slow motion.

The Long-Term Shock We Aren’t Planning For

This is where Strategic Workforce Planning has to step up. Because while executives are rightly focused on near-term AI benefits cost reduction, speed, scale, the downstream impact on talent pipelines is massive. If we don’t address it now, we’ll look up in five years and wonder:

• Why don’t we have enough internal candidates for leadership roles?
• Why is our talent skew so heavily toward mid-to-late career hires?
• Why do our diversity metrics stagnate after the first promotion?

It will be because the ladder broke at the bottom, and no one thought to build a ramp.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: many organisations are automating away the roles that once served as the on ramp into their professions. But they are not replacing them with alternative development paths. And without new entry mechanisms, the talent model becomes brittle. The pipeline dries up. Organisational memory thins.

AI itself will suffer

AI today is powerful, but not magical. It is trained on our output books, code, marketing decks, medical journals, legal arguments, strategy papers, conversations. It’s a mirror of accumulated human effort, not a self-originating intelligence.

And here’s the part we’re not talking about enough: what happens when that mirror stops reflecting growth?

If entry level roles disappear without being replaced with intentional learning pathways, we don’t just lose career progression. We lose the next generation of human insight that AI would otherwise learn from.

The erosion of talent development isn’t just a workforce problem it’s an epistemological one. The future capabilities of AI still depend on new human knowledge, which depends on human experience, which begins in those seemingly low-stakes, early career roles that are now under threat.

Put bluntly: if we break the human learning loop, we eventually stagnate the machine learning loop.

We risk entering a recursive loop where AI is trained on an increasingly derivative set of knowledge refining the last generation’s thinking but failing to capture the next one. If our organisational systems no longer foster real human growth, then the intelligence we outsource to machines will eventually plateau.

Time for SWP to Do What It Was Built For

SWP is upstream thinking. That’s why it’s so hard to sell and why it matters most right now. The downstream effect of entry level role erosion won’t show up in next quarter’s numbers. But it will show up when we can’t find experienced talent five years from now. When we’re forced to overpay for external hires, or when succession plans fail silently.

So, what do we do?

1. Map the Disrupted Pathways

Work with business and HR leaders to identify the roles most exposed to AI replacement and trace their historical contribution to talent pipelines. Ask: Where did our current managers start their journey? If that role is vanishing, you need to design an intentional replacement.

2. Rebuild with Alternative Development Models

If entry-level roles are disappearing, we must double down on structured apprenticeships, internal mobility pathways, skill bridges, and cross-functional rotations. This is not fluff it’s architectural. Your future leadership is at stake.

3. Quantify the Risk

Use the language the business listens to. What is the financial exposure if we cannot internally fill critical roles in 3–5 years? What does churn from failed promotions cost us? How much external premium are we already paying for experience we used to build ourselves?

This is classic SWP forecasting demand, mapping capability supply, and planning for gaps. Except now, the gap is not just in roles. It’s in growth.

AI Doesn’t Just Replace Jobs. It Erases Journeys.

Let’s bring it back. These shifts don’t just make work faster they fundamentally reshape who gets to participate in the economy. We’ve seen it before. And now, it’s not isolated it’s administrators, coders, coordinators, analysts, and support teams watching the ground shift beneath them. The real danger isn’t just job loss. It’s the erosion of career formation the disappearance of the proving grounds where talent is shaped, judgment is built, and future leaders emerge.

If we want to prepare our organisations and our people for the AI era, we can’t just focus on how work changes. We have to plan for how workers grow.

This is the moment SWP was made for. Not because we can predict what jobs will exist in five years. But because we know this: if you kill the entry point, and don’t replace it with something better, you’ve built a ladder to nowhere.

We’re here to build ramps. Let’s get to work.

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