WORK
If you saw my post on LinkedIn, here is the follow-up. If not, whether you are a CEO or HR pro, in small to midsize+ frontline companies, this is for you!!
Your Workforce Strategy Has a Deadline
Last week I read an article that went viral in tech circles and beyond. (Linked below.) Matt Shumer, an AI founder, wrote about what's happening inside tech companies. How AI went from "helpful tool" to "does my job" in about eighteen months. He shared data showing AI capabilities doubling every 4-7 months.
I've read a lot about AI over the past year. I've presented keynotes and workshops on AI. But this piece was something entirely different for me. Because it's really a story about workforce development failure.
Tech companies had six years of increasingly obvious signals. Most waited until the change was already happening to start preparing their people. Now they're scrambling.
And I keep having the same conversation with distribution and manufacturing leaders and their HR leaders. "How do we incorporate AI into our business?" Some of my clients are already using AI and investing in the future. Most aren't. And that's not unusual. (Today. It will be unusual very soon.)
But there's an even more important question: "How do we develop our workforce for capabilities that don't even exist yet?"
The companies that make it through disruption are companies with people who know how to adapt.
What is Going on In Distribution and Manufacturing Right Now
Your inventory planners spend most of their day gathering and cleaning data, with maybe 20% of their time applying judgment. Your customer service team is buried in routine questions they've answered a thousand times. Your inside sales reps spend hours on quotes and administrative follow-up. Your schedulers manually build routes and manage exceptions.
AI can already handle big chunks of all of those jobs. And it's happening in companies just like yours.
What if those same people could spend their time on strategy, relationships, solving complex problems, and the work that requires human judgment?
That's a workforce development question, not a technology question.
And most of us have zero infrastructure to answer it.
Think about how we've been approaching training for decades: identify a skill gap, build a program, roll it out, check the box, call people "trained." (If we were lucky and had training at all!) That worked when skills stayed relevant for five years.
What happens when skills change every six months?
We're not ready. And I'm including myself in that. I'm two years into my own business as an Advisory Chief People Officer to distribution and manufacturing companies. I've been working with some of them for a couple years now. And I viewed workforce development as a year two or year three focus.
Not anymore. I've been completely rethinking how I talk about workforce development with clients. I'm retooling my entire AI in HR workshop. I'm learning Claude Code to better understand what's actually possible. I'm developing another e-book specifically for distribution and manufacturing leaders on this exact topic.
Because this isn't something we can push to next year.
Stop Thinking About Jobs. Start Thinking About Outcomes.
Many leaders thinking about AI are asking "Can AI do this job?"
That's not the right question.
The right question is: "What do we actually need to accomplish?"
Most companies think about their customer service team: "We need X number of reps to handle our call volume."
Take a step back. Forget about reps for a minute. What outcomes do your customers actually need from you?
They need fast answers to routine questions. Accurate information. Help solving complex problems. Someone who knows their account and cares about their business.
Look at each outcome and ask: What's the best way to deliver this?
Fast answers to routine questions? AI handles that better than humans. It's available 24/7, never has a bad day, and gets more accurate over time.
Complex problem-solving and relationship building? That's where humans are irreplaceable. That requires judgment, empathy, and deep knowledge of the customer.
So instead of hiring more reps to handle growing volume, you could do something different. AI can handle tier-one questions. Then, instead of replacing every CSR that retires, you can invest in fewer, more skilled people who focus entirely on the complex, high-value work.
Same budget. Better customer outcomes. Happier, more engaged employees doing work that actually matters.
This is a huge shift from how most companies in this space think about work. It’s not "how do we do the same work cheaper?" but "what outcomes do we need, and what's the best way to deliver them?"
And once you start thinking this way, your options open up completely.
Maybe that demand planning work doesn't need a full-time employee. Maybe you need someone exceptional for 15 hours a week. Maybe that Marketing support doesn't require an in-house team. Maybe fractional expertise gets you better results. Maybe your HR Manager is amazing with employee relations, but you need to supplement with an Advisory Chief People Officer for strategic support. Maybe you need surge capacity that flexes with your busy season instead of carrying excess headcount year-round.
Distribution and manufacturing have been stuck in industrial-era workforce models. Full-time or nothing. Everyone on-site. Traditional org charts. Forty hours a week whether there's forty hours of work or not.
That model is breaking. And the companies that see that as an opportunity instead of a threat are going to build something completely different that lasts.
Here's What This Looks Like in Practice
Companies that are building this way are teaching people to work with AI, not against it. Demand planners use AI for data analysis so they can spend their time on customer relationships and strategic forecasting. Inside sales teams let AI handle quotes and follow-ups while they focus on actually selling and building accounts.
They're making learning part of the work, not something extra. Daily experimentation. Sharing what they learn. Trying new tools without waiting for permission. It's just how work gets done.
They're investing in what matters more. Critical thinking. Communication. Relationship building. Good judgment. The things AI doesn't replicate, and the things that create real competitive advantage.
They're being straight with their people. Not creating panic, but creating readiness. Being honest about what's changing, what they're planning, and how they're investing in people to adapt.
And they're rethinking their entire workforce model. Not just optimizing the old way of working, but imagining entirely new ways to deliver outcomes.
These companies aren't panicking. They're building. And they're pulling ahead of competitors who are still debating whether this is real.
They aren’t, however, always sharing this publicly. Distribution and Manufacturing companies are often gatekeeping this knowledge because it is a competitive advantage. But it can be yours as well!
What This Means for HR
As a career-long HR practitioner, this hurts me to say this, but it's true.
HR is at risk too.
All that transactional work like benefits admin, compliance paperwork, answering the same basic questions over and over, AI can do that. Some of it already does. If most of your day is pushing paper and answering "how do I request PTO?" for the hundredth time, that work isn't safe.
But there's a huge opportunity here.
I've been talking about this shift for years. Transactional HR to strategic HR. Paper-first to people-first. This is that moment. It's here. It's been here for a while, but now in a way we can't ignore anymore.
We can either automate ourselves into irrelevance, or we can step up as the strategic partners CEOs are desperate for right now.
Because somebody needs to help leaders navigate the people side of all this. And that's our work. Just maybe not the work we've been doing up until now. This is strategic work. The kind that needs judgment, business sense, and people who genuinely care.
Here’s our opportunity:
Figure out which roles to defend, which to transform, and which to let go. Not based on spreadsheets. Based on what actually creates value and keeps culture intact.
Help leaders think in outcomes instead of jobs. Challenge the assumption that every role needs to be full-time. Help them imagine entirely new workforce models. Connect business strategy to people strategy in ways that actually drive results.
Build learning cultures that can move this fast. Not training programs. Learning cultures. Places where people expect to keep growing, where "I don't know how to do that yet" starts a conversation instead of ending a career.
Help people through what happens when they realize their jobs are changing. Because they will. They're reading the same headlines we are. And if we're not talking to them honestly, they're making up their own stories - and those stories are always worse than the truth.
Make sure we don't lose our humanity while we're racing to adopt new technology. I don't think we're thinking about this enough yet, but it's going to matter enormously. How do you stay people-first when you're automating jobs? How do you keep trust when everything feels uncertain? How do you keep the culture you built from falling apart?
This is our work. The most important work we'll ever do. The work that actually needs what we bring: understanding people, building trust, seeing what's coming, connecting business strategy to what it means for humans.
This is our moment. But we've got to be ready for it.
What Everyone Needs to Do This Month
Start using AI yourself. This week.
I don't care what your title is. You need to understand what this technology actually does. Not what ChatGPT did two years ago. What it does now.
Sign up for Claude or ChatGPT. Twenty dollars a month. So worth it. (I have paid subscriptions to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gamma and a few other tools, and I'm happy to chat about this anytime!)
Don't just ask it quick questions. Push it into your real work. Doing workforce planning? Give it your data and ask it to find patterns you're missing. Writing job descriptions? Have it draft five versions. Got a scheduling nightmare? Describe the problem and see what happens.
One hour a day. Every day. Try something new every time. Do that for a month and you'll understand what's coming better than 99% of the leaders in your industry.
Senior leaders - I'm especially talking to you. You set the tone. If you dismiss this or delegate it, everyone else will too.
Assess your workforce exposure.
Sit down with your team. Go role by role. Ask yourselves:
What could AI handle right now?
What roles are at risk in the next couple years?
What skills are going to matter more?
Who needs to upskill first?
And please don't do this to figure out who to cut. Do it to figure out who to invest in and how.
The people doing work AI can replicate? They need to become the people who know how to work with AI to do things that weren't possible before. That's your workforce strategy.
Rethink outcomes, not just roles.
For each major function in your business, ask: What outcomes do we actually need to deliver? Then work backward. Maybe it's full-time employees. Maybe it's fractional support. Maybe it's contractors. Maybe it's on-demand staffing. Maybe it's AI plus a small team of experts.
The answer doesn't have to be what you've always done.
Build your learning infrastructure NOW.
Not training programs. Learning cultures.
Too many of us are still doing skill development like it's 1995. Find a gap, build a program, roll it out, check the box, done.
That doesn't work when skills change every six months. It just doesn't.
You need organizations where continuous learning is expected. Where people experiment, share what they learn, teach each other, try new things without asking permission first.
That doesn't happen by accident. Leaders create space for it, reward it, do it themselves, and get rid of whatever makes learning feel like extra work.
Talk to your people honestly.
Your people are reading the headlines. They're worried. I know because they're telling me they are.
Silence doesn't protect them. It creates fear. Rumors. The assumption that you're hiding something worse.
Talk to them. Tell them what you know. What you don't know. What you're doing to prepare, and what you need from them. Tell them you're investing in them, not replacing them.
Then actually do it.
Transparency creates trust. And trust is the only thing that'll hold culture together through what's coming.
Invest in your HR function.
If your HR team is drowning in transactional work, they can't help you with any of this. I see this all the time.
Automate the transactional stuff. Don't just talk about it, actually do it. Let AI handle the routine questions, the paperwork,the basic processes.
Then free your HR people up to do strategic work. Upskill them. Give them access to business data. Bring them into strategy conversations. Help them think like business partners.
The companies that make it through this well will be the ones whose HR evolved fast enough to lead the transformation instead of getting transformed by it.
My Final Thoughts
Tech companies had years to get their people ready for this shift. Many didn't. Now they're scrambling to retrain, restructure, and rebuild culture on the fly.
You're watching their mistakes happen in real-time. You get to learn from what they did wrong.
The question is whether you'll use that advantage.
The companies that invest in workforce development now, companies that teach people to work with AI, that build cultures of continuous learning, that focus on capabilities that matter more, that completely reimagine how work gets done are the ones that'll come out of this stronger.
The ones that wait will be building workforce strategies for a world that already changed.
You don’t need all the answers today. I don’t have them either. This is moving too fast for anyone to have certainty.
But you do need to start building. Start learning. Start preparing your people. Start questioning assumptions about how your workforce needs to be structured.
Because workforce development isn't about preparing for some distant future anymore.
It's about making it through the next year.
And I believe you can do this. I really do. But you have to start.
What's one thing you're going to do this week? I'd love to hear what you're thinking. If you need help figuring out where to start, reach out by replying to this email! And if you are in Distribution and aren't following Nick Pericle, please fix that right now. His content is pure gold, and is absolutely packed with practical takeaways and learnings you can use right now.
COMMUNITY
In this section, sometimes I highlight entire communities, but sometimes, like today, I highlight a member of my community that others should know about.
Morgan Williams is writing daily posts about Black history all month, highlighting a Black creator, author and builder in each. I've been reading along every day, and look forward to learning something new whenever she drops a post. Yesterday's post about scientist and inventor James E. West was particularly interesting. (I had no idea that his technology from the 1960s is present in most microphones today!) If you want to read them as well, follow Morgan below.
COFFEE
I'm working today, and Dave's working on content for his podcast "One More Dig: Metal Detecting Stories," and the hotel's coffee shop closed at 11, so I had Doordash deliver my afternoon coffee from Gregory's. I've had Gregory's before, but not "The Iced Love Affair." I figured it was appropriate for the day after Valentine's Day. It also included two of my favorite flavors - strawberry and chocolate. Something a little different than my usual iced espresso, but it was delicious, and I got to enjoy it with this incredible view we are lucky to have for a couple of days.
See you next week!
Until next time....... thanks for reading! (Next time I'll share much more about where I'm speaking, upcoming webinars, and more of what I'm working on with clients.) Any questions, thoughts, or things you want to see in the next newsletter? Just reply to this one!
