The media narrative about AI tends to focus on what’s disappearing—roles, skills, even entire career paths. Disruption is real, and it’s here today. But AI is also the most powerful tool we have for helping people adapt and thrive amid change.

At Valence’s recent virtual summit, AI & the Workforce: The Adoption Gap, Reid Hoffman (cofounder of LinkedIn and partner at Greylock) and Gillian Tett (chair of the editorial board at the Financial Times) offered a clear-eyed view of how AI is reshaping the workplace. They also laid out the opportunity talent leaders have to transform the AI narrative in a way other functions don’t.

https://youtu.be/oGRpwSTuTRc?si=hcfURCpLQfXZ8h5O

Everyone Becomes a Manager with a Team of Agents

In the near future, Reid sees AI fundamentally redefining how work gets done.

“There won’t be such a thing as an individual contributor anymore. Every person will have a small-to-large team of AI agents facilitating what they’re doing, and they will be managing that process with those agents.”
— Reid Hoffman

Enormous opportunity is created when individuals can work more broadly and creatively, and we can rethink how teams collaborate and deliver impact.

But that impact demands a new skill set. If every employee is managing a team of AI agents, then the skills of delegation, critical thinking, and coordination—once expected primarily of managers—become foundational across the workforce.

It’s a shift that starts at the very beginning of a career. If AI is handling the entry-level tasks that once served as scaffolding, the old apprenticeship model doesn’t hold. 

As an editor at the Financial Times, Gillian has seen first-hand how those early tasks help build essential skills: “Those jobs were a really good training ground for learning how to handle data and information.” 

As AI continues to transform collaboration and the talent ladder, HR leaders must also intentionally rethink, rebuild, and evolve talent development strategies.

1:1 education at scale

From her vantage point in academia, Gillian notes that the most effective learning happens in dialogue when you have to explain your thinking and reflect on your conclusions.

That kind of one-to-one education has historically been reserved for elite university settings. But now, Reid argues, AI makes it possible for everyone to have a personal guide, helping them better understand how they’re thinking, what they’re learning, and how they work best.

In his view, this isn’t just a benefit of AI. It’s the central opportunity.

“AI is, by many, many miles, the best educational tool we have created in human history.”
— Reid Hoffman

Learning, embedded

For Hoffman, this kind of one-to-one learning shouldn’t be confined to training programs. It should be happening constantly in the flow of everyday work.

One of the clearest examples is how we meet. Hoffman predicts that AI won't just transcribe conversations—it will surface follow-up questions, point to missed connections, and suggest next steps in real time.

These moments of insight and redirection add up to a new kind of embedded learning. Eventually, he says, we’ll come to treat them as a natural part of how work gets done:

“If you’re not using AI tools, you’ll be under-tooled. It’ll be like saying, ‘I’m a carpenter, but I use rocks, not hammers.’”
— Reid Hoffman

The time to experiment is now

Reid and Gillian’s advice to leaders is simple: don’t wait.

“You can’t say, ‘We’re gonna set these three people to go off and study it and come back in six to twelve months and tell us about it.’ I think that’s too slow.”
— Reid Hoffman

Instead, start experimenting. Create regular opportunities for teams to share what they’ve tried, what they’ve learned, and what tools they’re using. Build fluency by using, not observing. This is a push we’ve heard echoed by Ethan Mollick, who says leaders need to get hands-on with AI, not delegate it.

The call is urgent because the future of work is being built now, and AI’s potential won’t fulfill itself. “Any innovation can either unleash our demons or the angels of our better nature,” says Gillian. Whether AI becomes a tool for human amplification or just another wave of disruption depends on the choices leaders make now, especially those responsible for developing talent.

The HR leaders who seize this moment won't just change the narrative on AI. They'll transform how their people learn, develop, and work together.

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For more insights, or to register interest in our November Summit, explore the AI & the Workforce Series.