Reviewed 25 October 2026.
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AI may change the work inside a job without replacing the whole job. For an employer, the useful starting point is a task map: what people do, what judgement it requires, where mistakes matter and what would change if software prepared part of the work.
The ILO's 2025 research on occupational exposure assesses tasks and distinguishes potential exposure from observed employment effects. An exposure estimate is not a forecast of redundancies at your business. Adoption, infrastructure, skills and the way work is organised affect what happens in practice.
This guide provides a planning worksheet for a team conversation and controlled trial. It does not predict that jobs will disappear or promise that none will change. Decisions about employment, terms or organisational restructuring need their own evidence, authority and applicable professional advice.
Choose one role or shared process and ask the people doing the work to describe a normal week. Include preparation, checking, interruptions, customer conversations, recovery from errors and helping colleagues. A job description alone can miss the work that keeps the process functioning.
Separate the task from its output. “Write a customer reply” may involve reading the account history, interpreting a request, checking a policy, deciding whether an exception is appropriate, writing the reply and recording a commitment. An assistant that drafts the wording has addressed only part of that chain.
| Question | Record before the trial |
|---|---|
| What starts the task? | Trigger, input and the result another person needs. |
| Who does it now? | Task owner, reviewer and people who handle difficult cases. |
| Where is judgement needed? | Uncertainty, exceptions, relationships and consequences of a wrong answer. |
| What could change? | Specific preparation or checking steps; what remains with a person. |
| What new work appears? | Review, correction, maintaining sources, access management and recovery. |
| What skills are needed? | Skills to retain, practice to provide and help people can access. |
| How will it be assessed? | Quality criteria, total effort, staff experience and stop conditions. |
| Who decides? | Authority to run the trial and the separate authority for any lasting change. |
Describe observations rather than rating the value of an employee. “The team retypes a reference into two systems” is a process finding. “This role is replaceable” is a much broader conclusion that the observation does not establish.
A clearer form, shared template, saved report or ordinary rules-based automation may remove the problem. Compare those options with AI assistance. Do not make a more complex system the default merely because it can produce a convincing demonstration.
For each option, identify what remains difficult when an input is missing or unusual. If the existing process depends on an experienced colleague quietly resolving those cases, that responsibility still needs an owner.
Explain the problem, the proposed trial and which decisions remain open. Ask affected staff and relevant representatives to challenge the task map. They may identify an exception, an accessibility need or an informal checking step that management has not seen.
Acas guidance on consultation distinguishes ordinary good-practice discussions from circumstances where a particular legal process applies. Use appropriate advice for the jurisdiction and proposed change; this worksheet is not a substitute for consultation or employment obligations.
A useful discussion asks:
Record alternatives and unanswered questions. Be honest about what has and has not been decided. Do not describe a final restructuring decision as an open-ended software trial, or promise a particular employment outcome without authority and evidence.
A fictional service business wants help preparing replies to routine delivery questions. The proposed tool can read approved order-status records and draft an answer. It cannot refund a customer, amend an order or send a message.
The task map reveals that staff also reconcile conflicting records, identify promises made in earlier conversations and recognise complaints requiring escalation. The trial therefore includes those cases. The expected behaviour is to show the evidence and uncertainty, not turn every request into a routine answer.
The support adviser checks each draft. A team lead reviews errors and whether the queue of difficult cases has changed. The team measures preparation, review, correction and escalation effort together. A shorter drafting step does not prove that the complete service needs fewer people.
This is a hypothetical design exercise, not a client case study. A real trial needs its own approved data, checks and decision about whether the result is useful.
Distinguish evaluating a workflow from scoring individual workers. Do not add keystroke tracking, private-message analysis or inferred attitudes simply because a tool offers them. Those are different processing activities with different consequences.
The ICO's worker-monitoring guidance covers purpose, lawful basis, fairness, transparency and related safeguards. It also explains why employee consent is not usually appropriate as a basis for monitoring. Check the actual arrangement with the people responsible for data protection and employment matters.
Write down what the team must still understand after the change. Staff checking a generated calculation or explanation need enough subject knowledge to challenge it. Do not remove the practice that builds that knowledge without considering how people will learn it another way.
A training plan can include:
Plan who maintains prompts, source documents and access. If review and maintenance fall to one experienced employee, include that workload in the assessment. Work has not disappeared merely because it moved to somebody else.
Measure the complete task on comparable inputs. Record preparation, review, rework and exception handling. Also ask whether staff can explain the result, whether customers receive the correct service and whether another person can recover the process when it fails.
For a purely fictional calculation, suppose drafting a report takes ten minutes less but checking and correction take seven minutes more. The net difference is three minutes per comparable report, before setup and maintenance. That figure does not show a payroll saving, a role that can be removed or additional sales.
Say what released capacity would be used for and how that decision will be assessed. A business may use time for a backlog, better service, training or different work. Those are management choices, not automatic consequences of an AI subscription.
At the review, compare the trial with the starting process and the simpler alternatives. Record useful outputs, material errors, staff feedback, new work and the cost of operating it. Then choose to stop, revise, continue within the same boundary or prepare a separate proposal for expansion.
Expansion should state what changes: users, data, permitted actions, review responsibilities or working arrangements. A successful drafting test does not authorise sending customer messages, making employment decisions or changing a role.
Keep the accepted task map, training plan, unresolved questions and recovery instructions. Revisit them when the tool, source material or process changes. Our human-review guide and pilot planning guide help define the operational checks.
For help structuring the workflow and team practice, see AI training for business teams or start a free conversation. Bring the task, the people involved and the questions the trial needs to answer.
Blue Canvas AI Ltd is responsible for this guide. Spotted an error? Email contact@bluecanvas.ai.
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