Since the Covid19 pandemic leaders have wrestled with hybrid work as a two-dimensional challenge. It has been about where work happens – home, office or both. That brought the challenge of how work gets done - managing coordination, communication, output and accountability, not to mention the sense of belonging to a workplace. The evidence is slowly building – what works?

Large-scale studies suggest hybrid work can lift retention and satisfaction without harming performance, when designed well. In developed economies such as the UK, EU, USA and Australia hybrid is no longer a bad pandemic aftertaste. It has become a structural feature of the labour market, with, in Australia 36% of employed people usually working from home (ABS, August 2025).

The world of work has added a third dimension: AI agents and assistants. Not “AI somewhere in the tech stack”, but AI sitting in the workflow - drafting, analysing, summarising, routing, monitoring, and increasingly acting with a degree of autonomy.

This has created a new practical leadership question. It is not “How do I manage a hybrid team of people?” anymore. The new question is “How do I lead a team that includes people and non-human digital workers?”

While some sensationalist commentators have predicted a jobs bloodbath, the contrarian point of view is that we should expect fewer “replaced humans” and more “amplified humans”.

GenAI is more likely to augment jobs than replace them, with impact varying widely by occupation and industry. Globally, the World Economic Forum forecasts substantial churn, but not a one-way exit: it projects job creation and destruction equivalent to 22% of today’s roles by 2030, including 170 million new jobs (14%) created through structural transformation.

And we are starting to see hard productivity evidence in real workplaces. A major field study of a generative-AI assistant deployed to support customer-support agents found a 15% average productivity gain, with the biggest gains among less experienced workers (they know what to ask AI for). AI can act as a capability booster - but only if it is integrated properly into how work gets done.

Hybrid work demanded better systems and communication and there was a Zoom and Teams led digital transformation. Agentic work will demand even more nuanced coordination with the ability to design a socio-technical team where humans and AI each do what they are best at becoming an essential skill.

As an executive search practice, we expect demand to rise for leaders who can demonstrate:

· Stronger work design capability with the capacity to differentiate between tasks and responsibilities and decide what is to be automated, what is augmented, and what remains distinctly human because it is rich in judgement, ethics, relationships and meaning-making.

· AI interaction literacy where the human ability to supervise, ask meaningful questions, (prompts) evaluate, escalate and manage risk will be at a premium.

· Decision governance. Apart from being grounded in the basic structures of types of decisions. which can be disturbingly uncommon now, clarity on which decisions an AI can recommend, augment and make and what must stay humanly accountable is essential.

· The insights to protect cultural integrity when leveraging with AI in order to maintain trust, psychological safety, and shared values will be distinctly human.

· The foresight to multiply the capabilities of human talent by developing people to people to work with AI and coaching teams to use AI as a thinking partner, not a crutch.

Right now, we are seeing AI assistants fill multiple “digital colleague” roles: such as analysts, (we have found it invaluable in our executive search practice to find patterns in a leader’s career development that match the development ambitions of client organisations), draftsperson for first drafts of just about anything, scheduling (we mapped out a year’s worth of coaching appointments with client executives across 5 distinct projects ) and more.

Yet highest-value work remains human, Value is created in organisations by imagination, creativity, strategic foresight, values-based judgement, stakeholder navigation, and story telling. For years we have consulted to clients trying to help them release the true value of their visionary people and not become caught up in admin and people issues. AI can articulate so many more ideas for evaluation for these and it is inevitable that only those with these deep human skills will; be able to extract this kind of value out of AI.

What this means for executive search and leadership development is straightforward. We will increasingly assess “agent-ready” leadership as a productivity driver, We will do so alongside the timeless fundamentals of strategy, people leadership, and execution and will ask HOW? We will look for executives who can build hybrid work systems that include AI – we’d even call them teams. Then we will be exploring how they hang onto vision, culture and values while doing this at speed.

In leadership development, we will be helping leaders move from “AI curiosity” to repeatable, well governed delivery without losing trust, accountability, or the human drivers of differentiation.

Hybrid work did not end; it evolved. Now it is three-dimensional. The leaders who thrive will be those who can lead people brilliantly, and direct AI wisely - without confusing volume for value.

Let me make a clarification

· AI assistants sit in the flow of work and respond when asked (drafting, summarising, analysing). They help us understand the content and value in a CV or executive profile faster and encourage search consultants to gather more data

· AI agents go further: they can be configured to observe triggers, make choices, and execute tasks—sometimes without waiting for a prompt. We are already doing this in quick screening calls – the candidate pauses too long, the AI agent prompts, the answer has no detail – the AI agent prompts

References

· Stanford SIEPR (2024): Hybrid work can be a win-win-win (study by Bloom et al.). https://siepr.stanford.edu/news/hybrid-work-win-win-win-companies-workers-study-finds

· Australian Bureau of Statistics (Aug 2025): Working arrangements. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/earnings-and-working-conditions/working-arrangements/latest-release

· Jobs and Skills Australia (2024): Generative AI capacity study report. https://www.jobsandskills.gov.au/publications/generative-ai-capacity-study-report

· World Economic Forum (2025): The Future of Jobs Report 2025. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/

· Brynjolfsson, Li and Raymond (2023/2024): Generative AI at work: evidence from a field experiment in customer support. Quarterly Journal of Economics. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/140/2/889/7990658