AI Decisions are Workforce Decisions

Chris Huyck Trout

Senior Advisor and Consultant

There’s a John Mellencamp song that’s popped into my head recently: “Check It Out.” It’s a tune about how we get into the flow of life. Our Mondays and Tuesdays, our neighbors, our hellos. Not only does life come at you fast and you miss out, but in today’s environment we miss opportunities right in front of us. We miss opportunities to make the most of our existence. And even when we know these kinds of things are happening, we keep missing it. The song, for me, calls on us to start paying closer attention to it, because of the paths that we are creating, and the hope that somebody has to create a better understanding of all of this. This leads me to the constant  AI coverage and noise. How are we shaping future generations with this disruptive technology?

I’ve now sat with three different cohorts of the Education and Career Mobility Fellowship through a conversation about AI and the workforce, and it’s clear that AI is not creating one future. It’s opening up several. And what’s true is this: which future AI creates, and which future is best for business and humanity, is ours to decide.

What I saw in those rooms is that, given the space to actually think and, disconnected from the day-to-day pressures, these leaders could see where their influence on this subject lies. They could see where their business was thinking of taking things. They could see where the workforce was being left out of the AI conversation, and the importance of getting the workforce involved in the conversation immediately.

Back inside their organizations, it’s hard to apply that clarity. Quarterly pressures,politics, silos, and  the fear of being wrong all make it harder. And across each cohort there was a consistency: a greater opportunity for the involvement of the workforce in the AI conversation.

Their instinct for what to do was telling, and it was not a grab for authority. Build relationships. Convene people. Ask sharper questions. Connect the groups. The real skill here is framing, positioning, and timing, and treating workforce development as a component of AI training and a source of competitive advantage.

One moment has stayed with me. A leader in healthcare described his team talking about skills, when a nurse asked,  “What happens if the technology goes away. If it fails, and the human skill is already gone, what then?” This question reveals what’s really at stake. 

AI decisions are workforce decisions. They may not start out that way, but they are. That’s a line I said in every  conversation, because the workforce isn’t being considered.

The numbers carry it. The World Economic Forum projects 170 million new roles and 92 million displaced by 2030, with 39% of the skills we use today changing. Harvard’s tracker has 57.9% of working-age adults already using generative AI, and adoption reached personal-computer levels sixteen years faster. In 2025, companies attributed 55,000 job cuts directly to AI, twelve times the number two years before. The defining challenge is reallocation, not creation.

Now lay something else next to that. We have historically been in a tough spot in this country when it comes to  foundational skills. Reading comprehension. Writing. This helps explain why major publications write to around an eighth-grade level, so real substance can still reach people and get them thinking.

With AI advancing, these skill levels stand to drop further, because people just want the easy answer. And the easy answer is often wrong.

Here is what goes down when reading comprehension goes down. Competitiveness. Growth. Development. The advancement of humanity. The one thing we hold that no other species can hold is that we have the ability to think about how we think. When we stop using the one thing that separates us, tons of things drop.

None of this is soft, and it has implications that come back around. If you slash your workforce, or simply don’t develop it, and that feeds a loss of comprehension and skill, people stop seeking elevated experiences. Their ability to grow their income drops. And that lands right back on your per capita income and your spending. Workforce implications are business implications.

So here is the argument. These are all old-school moves, and this change is so profound that old-school moves are going to hurt us tremendously. I am arguing against an efficiency-first mindset and the absence of the workforce in the room. It is the old playbook, run against a completely different world.

Don’t dismiss the workforce. Don’t just cut it. Treat this moment as an opportunity to grow and develop talent in even bigger ways. And to the leaders reading this: recognize this moment, and the importance of the human dynamics and what they mean. Can we stop? We have to stop treating AI as a tool that exists purely at the intersection of quarterly returns and Wall Street.

If you are making AI decisions considering only the business, and treating the workforce as just a cost on the balance sheet, you are missing a ton. You are missing the importance of driving humanity forward, and the long-term business gains that come with it.

Back to where we started, AI is not creating one future. It is opening up several. Which one gets created may depend on whether the people closest to the work bring their voice, and name what no one else is naming.

And it brings me back to the song, and the question it leaves me with. What are we doing with our workforces right now, with AI and all these practices that dismiss or ignore the workforce? Are we building roads that give future generations a better understanding, or not? What we make of this, we make for them.