by Katharine Torre
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I just got back from four months traveling through 17 countries and over 30 cities across Europe. I promise there is a point to this.
When traveling through the Italian Riviera, we got on the wrong train and ended up in a completely different town to the one we had intended. Anyone who knows me knows I am fairly Type A, organised, structured, and I like a plan (and when I say organised, I mean spreadsheet, colour-coding, the lot, so “organised” might be an understatement). Every instinct in me wanted to work out how to get back on schedule. Instead, we decided to just stay on and get off at the next stop. It ended up being one of our favourite towns of the entire trip…
Bringing this back to work: the businesses getting AI right are doing exactly what we did on that train. They are not scrambling to force everything back onto the original plan the moment things change. They are staying on, seeing where it leads, and building from there.
As AI takes over the routine and repeatable parts of a role, the businesses still gripping the old structure are the ones falling behind. The ones getting ahead are building new roles around exactly the moment the plan stops working: exception-handling and judgment. Microsoft’s own guidance to leaders is blunt on this: let AI and agents handle execution, and shift people toward decision-making and exception handling.
You can already see it in who gets hired. Nearly a third of managers are now looking for AI workforce managers or agent specialists, not people who can run the old process well, but people who can sit in the grey area a machine cannot and make the call anyway. Around one in five companies have already frozen entry-level hiring because of AI, and Stanford research shows the entry-level roles that remain are now seven times more likely to demand senior-level skills like judgement and leadership than they were a few years ago.
For candidates, that means the traditional entry point is closing, but a different one is opening. If AI is already handling the process work, proving you can make the judgment call matters more than proving you followed the standard path in.
For businesses, it means the hiring brief itself has to change. Recruiting for the same skills that filled the old pipeline will not find the people who can actually do this work now.
At Optimum Consulting, we practice what we preach by having open conversations about how AI is reshaping the workplace with both our clients and candidates. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, which is why we encourage businesses to start the conversation early. If you’re working through what your team needs to look like in the future, or you’re looking for people who can thrive in that evolving space, we’d love to have a conversation about how we can help.
AI is going to keep changing the plan. The question is whether you fight to get back on the original track or stay on the train to see where it leads.
For future reference, don’t trust me for directions … I’ll stick to recruitment for now.
Mia Newbold, Recruitment Consultant
