Grow With the People You Have

Most owner-managed companies have valuable work that nobody has time to do, such as following up with lapsed customers, improving production scheduling, or pursuing new accounts. Often the people best placed to do that work are tied up in the administrative and clerical tasks that come with their current roles. AI gives you a way to free up their time.

Start by finding out how much of each role AI can actually take over. In almost every case it is a subset of the activities, such as drafting, data entry or reporting, while the judgment, relationships and knowledge of your business stay with the person. The answer is then to keep the employee in the same role, or a modified one, and have them work in an AI-augmented way. The time recovered goes to higher-value work.

If a role can be fully automated, which you can confirm by running the AI alongside the person for a few months and checking its work against your standard, ask a different question: what higher-value role would serve the business, and who is best placed to fill it? An existing employee already knows your customers, products and way of working. In my experience, putting that knowledge into new work often leads to incremental revenue, through new sales or higher production volumes.

Re-skilling is what makes this work. A person moving from processing orders to supporting the business development staff needs training and time to build the background the new role requires.

I believe this is also why some companies are hiring again after cutting staff when they first adopted AI. Either they let people go before understanding how AI would change the way they staff the organization, or they need new people for new work. The research fits the first reason. In a Robert Half survey of 1,365 Canadian hiring managers, 34 percent of those who eliminated positions after implementing AI have since added the same or very similar roles back.¹ In a Careerminds survey of 600 human resources professionals, 55 percent said their company had not formally considered retraining or redeploying people before making layoffs.²

Try this with one role this week. List its tasks, mark the ones AI could handle, and decide what valuable work the person could do with the time. If you can identify that work, you have a growth plan.

Sources

¹ Robert Half, survey of 1,365 hiring managers in Canada, as reported in HR Reporter, “‘AI correction hires’ on the rise as Canadian employers reverse course,” May 13, 2026.

² Careerminds, “AI-led layoffs: What HR leaders wish they knew before making job cuts,” February 19, 2026, a survey of 600 human resources professionals who had made layoffs in the previous 12 months.