AI will move millions of workers into new jobs. Organisational design decides who makes it.

AI could push 770,000 US workers a year into new occupations.

That is 3.6 times the historical pace, according to a McKinsey Global Institute report published on 29 September. About 11 million US workers by 2035.

Where the moves fall

The detail that matters most for consumer and retail leaders: more than 75% of those moves sit in three groups. Office support. Retail and sales. Transport and logistics.

Those are the teams that sell, ship and service your product.

A second finding is about how those workers move. McKinsey also finds that only one in seven workers has a direct path to a new role. Almost half face what it calls an “unpaved” pathway.

An organisational design job first

Paving that path is an organisational design job before it is a training job. Someone has to redesign roles and structures, then bring each team through the change.

That was my brief when I designed and led the organisational design transformation programme that complemented an AI-native strategy, working with office-based and remote teams in Germany and the UK. The critical work was each team’s answer to one question: what does my job become?

Questions for leadership teams

Three questions for every leadership team this quarter:

• Which roles change first?
• Who owns the path from the old role to the new one?
• Will your people hear the plan from you, or from the rumour mill?

Not only a US story

The data covers the US workforce. Leaders in Asia should expect the same pressure on the same teams.

This is the work we do at 2Mix: the human side of AI transformation.