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The conversation about AI and jobs has it backwards. The question is not which roles AI will eliminate. The question is which humans will rise by learning to lead it.
I run a company with both human and digital workers. What I have seen happen over the past two years is not replacement but elevation. The humans who manage our AI workers are not losing their jobs. They are becoming dramatically better at working with them.
Mitch was a sales development representative whose job was outbound prospecting: finding potential customers, qualifying them, and setting meetings for account executives to close.
We deployed a digital sales development representative named Teddy to work alongside Mitch. Teddy handled initial outreach at scale. Part of Mitch’s job became coaching Teddy: reviewing its output, adjusting its approach, and making sure it performed.
By managing Teddy, Mitch became a better salesperson. He developed a deeper understanding of why the role exists, what messaging customers respond to, and what separates effective outreach from noise. He had to articulate things he only understood intuitively.
Nine months in, Mitch got promoted to account executive and closed 11 deals in his first month.
AI did not replace Mitch. Instead, AI elevated his skills because he was learning to manage it, which increased our sales capacity and lead quality.
Mitch’s story is not an exception; he demonstrated the impact of treating AI as a teammate and set the tone for how we now think. Across our company, the humans who manage digital workers are developing faster than their peers. They understand the work more deeply because they must.
You cannot coach a digital worker effectively without knowing why the job exists and what success looks like. You cannot give useful feedback without understanding what good output looks like and why. The act of managing forces clarity.
This is the opposite of what most people expect. The assumption is that AI takes work away from humans. What we have found is that AI, managed properly, makes humans confront the work at a deeper level than they ever had before.
Before we deploy any digital worker, we ask a question that most companies skip: What is the motivation for success in this role?
Companies naturally focus on defining tasks and often don’t think about the motivation behind a role; this difference matters.
Take interview scheduling in recruiting. An AI agent can schedule interviews between candidates and hiring managers. The task is straightforward. But in many organisations, the recruiter’s real goal is not the scheduled interview. It is face time with a busy hiring manager who otherwise will not return calls. The scheduling is the excuse for a deeper conversation about what the role needs, what is working, and what is not.
If you automate that task without understanding the motivation, you cut off the recruiter’s access to critical information. The task gets done, but the outcome fails.
The humans who thrive in an AI environment can answer this question. They understand not just what work gets done, but why it matters. That understanding enables them to deploy digital workers effectively and coach them toward real outcomes.
At the first company I founded, we scaled to nine offices worldwide. Each expansion meant figuring out a new workforce. The labor laws and cultural expectations were different, which meant we had to adapt our process.
But the fundamentals never changed. Success came down to humans who understood the work deeply enough to lead others through it, regardless of where those others were located or how they operated.
Digital workers are just another expansion. They have different characteristics and do not need weekends off. While they can scale instantly, they also require feedback in natural language rather than performance reviews. But the core challenge is the same: finding humans who understand the work well enough to lead it and invest in developing more of them.
The scarcest resource in the AI era will not be engineers who build these systems. It will be humans who can direct them.
These are people who understand business outcomes, not just tasks. People who can articulate why work matters, not just what work gets done. People who can coach a digital worker the same way a great manager coaches a new hire: with clarity about the goal, feedback on the output, and patience as performance improves.
The importance is on managerial skills rather than technical ones, and the companies that develop those skills will have an advantage that no amount of technology spending can replicate.
AI is not coming for your best people. It is about to show you who they are.
Brandon Metcalf is the founder and CEO of Asymbl.
