Cisco's HR chief said the 'worst thing' companies can do is pile more work on employees after AI saves time

• Cisco's Kelly Jones said the "worst thing" companies can do is pile more onto workers during initial AI adoption.
• She said leaders should frame AI as a tool that can give workers a percentage of their day back.
• Jones said the role of HR is shifting to redesigning work as AI tools change the distribution of work.

Has using AI meant you've ended up with more work on your plate?

At this early stage of adoption, Cisco's chief people officer, Kelly Jones, told Business Insider that the "worst thing" companies can do when trying to encourage AI adoption is to pile additional work on employees once they've freed up time.

"When you get into the space of AI experimentation, one of the most important things to do is not kill innovation when you're starting it," Jones said.

Jones is touching on the reality of AI adoption at many companies. Even as firms report productivity gains from AI tools, employees' days haven't necessarily gotten any shorter.

One Microsoft manager previously told Business Insider that AI tools cut his coding time — which used to make up the overwhelming majority of his workload —by 70%, yet his overall workload didn't shrink. Many leaders have also said that AI will free up employees' time, so they can focus on more "deep work," rather than suggesting that workers might get more free time overall.

Jones said that when leaders push AI adoption, they need to make it "really relevant" to the day-to-day work of employees, rather than making it another ask from their manager. It should be framed as a tool that helps employees reclaim a percentage of their day, the CPO said.

Most employees would be glad to save time spent on work, and she said companies get it wrong by saying, "here's three new things that we need you to do."

While the traditional 9-to-5 workday may not be undergoing a drastic overhaul, some employees have found ways to shave hours off their schedules using AI tools, freeing up time for other pursuits — whether or not they tell their employers. For instance, one worker told Business Insider he used AI to complete about half of his software engineering tasks and spent the rest of his day on Reddit and YouTube.

Jones said that if employees are doing better work in less time, "there's no negative to that." At this point in the innovation cycle, people should use AI to get work tasks done more rapidly if they can, she said.

While Jones discouraged automatically adding more to employees' plates, she said that figuring out what to do with reclaimed time is a more complicated question. Determining how work changes, how it should be redistributed, and how companies and employees make those calls is what HR is likely to focus on over the next year or two, she said.

"We are really at this precipice where we're going to be moving from managing jobs to redesigning work," Jones said.

She said the role of HR will shift into helping organizations figure out what work is allocated to humans and what work is done by AI — and how the two work together.