AI and Talent: Growing Together

Area business leaders report enthusiasm for the use of artificial intelligence in their workplaces, with 65% saying in the 2026 Springfield Business Journal Economic Growth Series survey that AI has boosted their company’s productivity or efficiency.

Accordingly, more than a quarter of respondents say they are changing their job descriptions or expectations as a result of AI. Despite what can only be described as a sea change from AI adoption, only 7.5% of business leaders report that they are eliminating positions or roles as a result of it.

It’s a result that bucks expectations, based on gloomy outlooks for workers in current research.

The international Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a think-tank based in Paris and including 38 democracies with market-based economies, estimates in its 2026 AI Exposure Measure that 27% of jobs in wealthy nations are at high risk of automation.

The survey results make sense to Don Harkey, CEO and founder of People Centric Consulting Group LLC.

“AI doesn’t need to help companies cut staff if the company is also growing,” Harkey said. “For example, if a company is growing fast enough to add 50 more workers but AI helps them add only 30, they are still adding staff.”

EGS data shows that 43% of business leaders do intend to increase their number of employees, a metric that’s up 5% from 2025 but below a 2024 total, which showed 54% planning staff increases.

According to Harkey, AI doesn’t supplant the need for human intelligence. In fact, the latter is useful for keeping the former in check.

“I see a lot of people, especially in management and executive positions, using AI to do more of the tasks they shouldn’t be doing in the first place,” Harkey said. “It’s like when the internet first became widely used; many people spent time getting sucked into all the possibilities. I recently spoke to a business owner who used AI to develop a tool for his company. He spent several hours on it, and while the tool sounds really cool, developing it isn’t really his job and now nobody is using it.”

The OECD states roles most susceptible to task replacement are white-collar professions, among them finance professionals, like examiners and actuaries; administration and general office personnel, like clerks and administrative assistants; technical and analytical professionals, like software developers and statisticians; and people working in media and law. Healthcare and trades are least susceptible.

Harkey believes that in general, people issues require people solutions.

“If your company has people issues (like poor communication, a lack of goals, untrained managers, or poorly defined roles), AI alone won’t fix them,” he said. “You could develop an AI agent to help two teams better collaborate, but if they hate each other, they won’t use it properly. If your managers don’t know how to hold people accountable, you can measure more problems in your organization, but you won’t be able to fix them.”

“Yes, and”
Seth Harrell, lead adviser with Imagine Foresight, a local firm that consults about future trends, said many people don’t know how to implement AI.

“AI represents a black box of possibilities and threats because people don’t fully understand how to implement it,” he said.

Harrell said the survey results do seem to indicate that business leaders believe they can have the best of both worlds.

“A key concept when exploring future scenarios is to adopt the improv comedy rule of ‘yes, and,’ because opposite effects can happen and are often the first blinder that a client has to overcome when trying to understand a broader range of possibilities for the future,” he said.

Harrell added that most people don’t yet know the proper mix of AI and human work for their business.

“They are trying to play both sides in a wait-and-see mode by dipping their toes in but not committing while AI infrastructure is still being built,” he said.

He added that major questions remain about AI.

“It is akin to the new space race but without an exact outcome like landing on the moon,” Harrell said. “Owners don’t want to let go of human workers with so much uncertainty around AI and they know that it is more costly to train a new worker than to just try to keep their staff in addition to adding AI.”

Harrell himself focuses on the broader view, taking in multiple scenarios around AI without advocating any particular stance.

“My job is not to take a firm stance on any single one,” he said. “My current interest is in researching emotional (affective) AI applications and how it could improve productivity in humans by creating a more emotionally responsive workplace.”

Leaders plan to invest
In the EGS survey, business leaders offered their responses to a tight labor market, with 61% saying they plan to increase pay, with flexible schedules, continuing education and enhanced benefits also cited. But the fourth most popular option for addressing labor needs is investing in automation, with 37.5% of respondents vying for the option.

Gabriel Cassady offers AI and information technology strategy and implementation advice through his company, Gabriel Cassady Consulting LLC. He is also co-founder with his wife, Kylie Cassady, of marketing firm 2Oddballs LLC.

Asked about the fact that higher adoption of AI does not seem to correspond with reduced plans for staffing among EGS respondents, Cassady blew the dust off of an economic principle from 1865 called the Jevons paradox. English economist William Stanley Jevons reflected at the time that the invention of the steam engine made coal usage significantly more efficient than it had been, but nevertheless, factories increased, rather than decreased, their coal consumption.

The Jevons paradox, then, is that increased resource efficiency leads to an increase in total resource consumption, as lower effective costs drive up demand.

What was relevant to coal in the late 19th century is also relevant to today’s most cutting-edge technology, Harrell said.

“When it gets cheap enough, you find more reasons to use it,” he said.

Right around the time Jevons published his thoughts on coal, the U.S. Civil War was settling a critical issue regarding human work and the future of human slavery. Simultaneously, mechanization was happening at a fast clip.

“In the past, human labor had a value, and there’s a dark history to that,” Cassady said. “When we started to invent engines and mechanized power, it changed the value of labor, and it changed the way we used labor and what we could do. We’re watching the same thing happen to intelligence.”

Just as mechanized power replaced body power, machine intelligence power has the potential to replace human mind power in many regards. Cassady said he is more optimistic about that idea than a lot of people are.

“In the long term, there is a path forward that results in humanity being better off on the other side,” he said.

Cassady said he went through a rare form of cancer a couple of years ago. It was a type of the disease seen previously in pediatric patients, and only pediatric data existed.

“Who’s putting very expensive human intelligence on that problem?” he said. “AI can be very useful, bettering lives and solving many concerning problems, like climate change and disease. I always say, ‘Find me a problem that is better or more effectively or efficiently solved with less intelligence.’ More intelligence is a good thing for humanity. It’s kind of our thing.”

Cassady said there are very realistic and present concerns about AI, including ethical ones. An example is questions about intellectual property.

He said he anticipates AI being used first to redesign roles as companies expand and grow. Like Harkey, he noted that a company may hire 10 people because it is expanding, but without AI it may have hired 15. It’s hard to quantify the overall impact, he noted.

But he said the first place AI is likely to make an impact is in entry-level roles, and that could have a negative impact on those workers who are trying to get their foot in the door to gain experience.

“I see people using AI to cut down on those positions,” he said. “Every thinking person understands there’s something different here.”