Jobs in the AI era: A practical guide for CHROs

Employees want reassurance about their future. Employers want efficiency and productivity. HR leaders sit in the middle, tasked with optimizing a workforce that now blends AI and people.

The uncertainty is real. As NPR’s Planet Money captured, workers are already rethinking careers. A bored intern in a beige break room picked up an LSAT prep book but hesitated, asking, “I don’t know if it’s worth the investment now to go to law school for three years, if I’m potentially going to just be replaced by an AI chatbot.” A product designer in her 30s began researching welding apprenticeships and even considered joining her mother’s nail salon business. These stories highlight what many CHROs already see: employees are scanning for safe harbors while leaders are struggling to frame the future.

We don’t have a crystal ball. What we do have is research.

What the data shows about AI exposure

Cornell researchers  looked across the U.S. workforce and found that AI exposure isn’t confined to any one group. Eighty percent of workers could see at least 10% of their tasks affected, and nearly one in five could see half their tasks reshaped. When AI-powered software is layered on top, as much as half of all work tasks could be completed faster at the same quality.

The researchers concluded that AI has the traits of a general-purpose technology, on the order of electricity, meaning its effects will eventually ripple across nearly every role, sector, and skill set.

Some skills only humans bring

MIT Sloan researchers Isabella Loaiza and Roberto Rigobon flipped the usual automation lens. Instead of asking what AI can do, they asked what humans can do that AI struggles with. Their EPOCH framework organizes nearly 19,000 tasks into five human capabilities:

• Empathy and emotional intelligence – creating trust and connection.
• Presence and connectedness – coordinating in real time, showing up when it matters.
• Opinion, judgment, and ethics – making calls under ambiguity or moral weight.
• Creativity and imagination – seeing new possibilities beyond the data.
• Hope, vision, and leadership – rallying people toward a future worth pursuing.
  
  

Critically, their findings showed:

• Human-intensive tasks are increasing. Between 2016 and 2024, the share of tasks requiring high EPOCH capabilities grew.
• Newly added tasks in 2024 scored higher on EPOCH than those that disappeared, signaling the labor market is already moving toward human complementarity.
• High-EPOCH clusters align with job growth. Tasks tied to hope and judgment showed the strongest positive link with employment gains.

Examples include roles as varied as emergency management directors, clinical psychologists, childcare providers, public relations specialists, and film directors, jobs where empathy, leadership, and creativity are core.

Loaiza summed up the broader implication: “If you’re aiming for disruptive innovation or truly transformative business, humans have a huge role to play.”

Why this matters for HR leaders

Put the two perspectives together and a clear picture emerges:

• Cornell shows the scale of exposure: AI will touch almost every job.
• MIT shows the source of resilience: empathy, presence, judgment, creativity, and hope.

For HR leaders, the challenge is not to identify safe versus unsafe jobs. It is to design organizations where AI clears space for human capabilities to thrive.

That means:

• Updating job architectures so EPOCH-linked skills are explicit in roles, not hidden behind vague “soft skills.”
• Rethinking hiring loops with scenarios that test for judgment, creativity, and presence under pressure.
• Framing adoption as augmentation, not just speed
• Coaching managers in decision hygiene, using AI to surface blind spots and strengthen reasoning rather than outsource judgment.

Their analysis also highlights specific occupations with consistently high EPOCH scores. These include emergency management directors, clinical and counseling psychologists, childcare providers, public relations specialists, and film directors. What ties them together is not industry, but the weight they place on empathy, judgment, creativity, and leadership.

A note of optimism

The MIT team found that hope and judgment, two of the hardest capabilities to teach—were also most closely tied to job growth. That is good news for organizations investing in leadership pipelines and manager development.

And as Planet Money concluded, “We learned more about the machines that might be coming for our jobs, and also, more about what it actually means to be human.”

The message to your workforce is not “don’t worry, your job is safe.” It’s “your role will change, and the most valuable parts of it are the most human.”

For HR leaders, that is the opportunity: use AI to automate the routine, then double down on the capabilities only people can lift.

Sources: 

NPR, Asking for a friend … which jobs are safe from AI? 

MIT Sloan, New research suggests AI more likely to complement, not replace, human workers 

MIT Sloan, These human capabilities complement AI’s shortcomings ‍

Cornell University, GPTs are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of Large Language Models