As AI reshapes how work gets done, some HR leaders say the link between workforce size and business performance is beginning to break down. There is evidence of this from McKinsey, which estimates that generative AI could lift U.S. labor productivity by 0.5%-0.9% a year through 2030, helping companies scale up without proportional hiring.
“For the first time, organizations can increase output, accelerate decision-making and expand market reach without scaling headcount at the same rate,” says Ronni Zehavi, CEO and co-founder of HR technology platform HiBob. He predicts that the organizations that pull ahead will be the ones that can redeploy talent quickly, pair human judgment with machine intelligence and out-adapt their competitors—not necessarily the ones with the largest workforces.
Workforce design wins
He suggests that the companies realizing AI ROI have paired technology investment with organizational redesign. “Too many organizations are approaching AI as a technology implementation rather than a workforce transformation initiative,” Zehavi says. “They’re investing in tools while leaving the underlying operating model unchanged.”
Zehavi isn’t alone in this insight. His view echoes Josh Bersin’s long-running argument that companies are moving toward flatter, team-based structures as technology and work patterns change. In his HR Tech Europe 2026 keynote, Bersin suggested the real opportunity is to raise performance, not simply reduce costs, and that some companies are focusing on the wrong goal.
Zehavi says the companies getting it right are organizing around skills, capabilities and outcomes rather than static job descriptions. They are also pushing decision-making closer to where work actually happens. That kind of redesign is harder for large enterprises due to decades of governance layers, rigid role structures and fragmented systems that create drag, according to Zehavi.
Mid-sized companies often have an advantage because they have fewer legacy structures to unwind, according to Zehavi. He says orgs in this size range can often move from experimentation to execution faster. “The winners of the AI era won’t necessarily be the organizations with the biggest AI budgets,” Zehavi says. “They’ll be the organizations that can translate technological capability into organizational agility.”
Layoffs aren’t the big story
Though the headlines highlight the recent wave of enterprise layoffs tied to AI, this outlook may miss the more consequential story. “The debate around AI has focused too heavily on job elimination and not enough on work transformation,” Zehavi says. “AI is changing the composition of work itself. Tasks are being automated, accelerated and redistributed. The boundaries of traditional roles are beginning to blur.”
Leading organizations are using disruption as a talent strategy through unlocking capacity, elevating higher-value work and redeploying people toward emerging priorities. The real divide won’t be between workers who are replaced and workers who aren’t, Zehavi says. “It will be between organizations that build adaptive workforces and those that fail to.” He points to internal talent marketplaces, continuous reskilling and clearer pathways for people to evolve alongside the business as the levers that will separate leading organizations from lagging ones.
The company of the future
“The company of the future is not simply leaner. It is fundamentally more dynamic,” he says. In his view of the future, fixed jobs, rigid hierarchies and annual planning cycles give way to fluid structures organized around skills, capabilities, projects and outcomes. “Skills are becoming the new currency of work,” he says.
In that model, leaders have real-time visibility into workforce capabilities, emerging skills gaps and future talent needs. Teams form and reform around business priorities and talent moves more easily across functions. “Managers become coaches, orchestrators and capability builders rather than supervisors of process,” Zehavi says. “Their role is increasingly focused on enabling performance, accelerating development and helping teams navigate constant change.”
The most successful companies won’t be those that automate the most, Zehavi says. They will be the ones who build the strongest partnership between humans and machines. “The future of work isn’t defined by AI replacing people,” he says. “It’s defined by organizations becoming dramatically better at understanding, developing and deploying human potential at scale.”
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