Workforce Design Strategies for the AI Era

Redesigning Work for a New Era: Why Workforce Design Is Every Leader’s Priority

When Moderna appointed a Chief People and Digital Technology Officer, merging HR and IT, it didn’t just shift reporting lines, it reshaped their entire organizational strategy. It's certainly a fascinating and unique shift from a management perspective. With over 3,000 internal custom GPTs running core operations, including talent management, regulatory response, and digital HR, the company is modeling what effective workforce planning can look like in a fully AI-driven and post-automation world.

This is an excellent example of strategic workforce design that anticipates the demands of a future workforce while optimizing the current workforce with AI. However, while a few companies are evolving, many fewer organizations have a real plan for adapting their workforce planning or structuring their teams around automation.

And here's the problem: most business leaders still use backward-looking reports to make forward-facing decisions. Without a holistic view of the current state of their workforce, they’re stuck managing the status quo instead of leading transformation.

Want to future-proof your workforce? Book a demo of Aura’s workforce intelligence platform and learn how to design agile, AI-ready teams based on real data.

Agentic AI and the Evolution of Workforce Roles

Moderna, with its innovative structure, is not completely alone. Across industries, businesses are integrating custom GPTs and Agentic AI, autonomous systems that act, adapt, and deliver results with little human input. These agents now manage everything from internal workflows to real-time customer service, creating a new class of "workers" that don’t show up in your headcount but significantly impact labor costs, business strategy, and even recruitment goals.

At Swan AI, a web marketing startup, the concept of workforce design takes an even bolder turn: the company is aiming to build a $30M ARR business with just three human founders and a growing ecosystem of autonomous AI agents. One such agent now manages onboarding, support, and product feedback workflows, delivering results at the equivalent cost of a $317K annual salary, growing 25% month over month. This isn’t just automation; it’s a complete rethinking of the operating model around intelligence, not headcount, and creates a new path for SaaS startup growth models.

This raises new questions for key stakeholders:

How many employees do we really need in a world of AI agents?
What will roles look like when augmented by custom AI instances?
What are the critical roles we must retain or retrain?
Are we equipping our teams with the right skills for the right jobs at the appropriate time?
How much should we invest in custom AI and tools to augment employees?

Understanding these dynamics is the foundation of modern strategic workforce planning. However, most companies still don’t have tools that connect AI, human capital, and organizational goals in one place.

Why Real-Time Workforce Intelligence Is Foundational to Design

With job roles evolving faster than most training programs can keep up, companies need real-time visibility into their own and their competitors' skills, team structures, and talent pipelines. That’s where Aura comes in.

Aura’s platform provides on-demand insights into:

How your organization compares to top performers in your industry
Where you’re over- or under-invested in job roles, skills, functions, or geographies
Which skill gaps you need to close to support your business growth and strategic goals
Where AI is driving displacement or augmentation and how to respond with targeted software development or new hires

We give business leaders, HR teams, and strategy units the data they need to monitor progress, align with organizational goals, and build a holistic approach to workforce management.

Designing for Augmentation, Not Just Automation

AI software and even agentic systems aren’t a prediction; they’re already here. The question is no longer if automation will shift how organizations operate, but where and when.

Functions like customer support, finance, and admin are already changing. Other roles, like those in the healthcare, marketing, and education workforce, still depend heavily on human creativity, emotional intelligence, and strategic thinking. What’s constant is that businesses must re-examine how they assign tasks, retain talent, and allocate support staff across different teams.

The most innovative companies seem to be using AI not to replace employees, but to augment them, freeing them to focus on complex decisions, cross-functional work, and leadership. This shift enables workers to deliver better outcomes and achieve higher job satisfaction. It’s not just a tech decision, but a human one.

Building Workforce Resilience Through Strategic Planning

As GenAI reshapes the workforce, companies need to move fast, but thoughtfully. That means:

Identifying gaps between current capabilities and future workforce needs
Partnering with educators and institutions to help students learn and prepare for employers’ evolving demands
Designing training programs that address both technical learning and adaptive thinking
Understanding the resources required to re- and upskill at scale

This is not a job for intuition or slide decks. It’s a data problem and a workforce demand challenge. Aura provides the intelligence layer that connects AI transformation to workforce strategy, helping companies optimize talent management, develop support staff, and position themselves for long-term success.

Aura: Powering Strategic Workforce Design at Scale

With real-time insights drawn from over a billion data points and millions of job profiles, Aura helps organizations:

Analyze the current workforce
Anticipate skills needed
Align hiring with strategic goals
Replace guesswork with clarity

Whether you're managing competitive intelligence and business development, engagement in the public sector, reducing labor costs in manufacturing, or planning AI augmentation in financial services, Aura delivers the data access and insights required to support your vision.

AI won’t stop evolving. And neither will your workforce. Redesign your workforce with confidence. Book a demo of Aura to see how AI-powered insights can help you align talent, structure, and strategy for the future of work.