Your favorite robot
Everyone is talking about the impact of AI on the job market. The headlines say things like, "Jobs getting replaced by AI" or "Your Favorite Company just laid off another 1,000 people thanks to AI."
Though the downsizing stories are real (and get all the clicks), this is just one part of what AI is doing to workforce planning. The jobs landscape is changing rapidly right now. Remember 2023, when everyone was hiring prompt engineers? These days, not so much. But some new roles will stick around. For instance, how many companies have a Chief AI Officer today, compared to five years ago?
Here at nerd processor, I'm most interested in the jobs that don't exist yet. Here are three enterprise roles that I'm betting will be ubiquitous by 2030.
#1: Curator
The quality and trustworthiness of AI output depends on the training data used to build the models. When the data is problematic, the results can be offensive, dangerous, or hilarious. Or all of the above.
When AI is used at work, it carries the promise that output will be not only accurate, but tailored to your business context. AI marketing tools are designed to keep you on brand; AI forecasting tools take your personal prior financial performance into account. Particularly for agentic solutions, where AI takes autonomous actions on your behalf, training data is the difference between value and chaos.
So who is responsible for selecting and curating the data that trains your AI tools to drive the right tailored outcomes? If you're like most companies today, no one is. But as companies grow more concerned with turning their AI investment into measurable results, this will change. In a world where everyone uses the same models and tools, data selection = AI performance.
Curators will emerge as semi-technical staff who are responsible for data selection and quality end-to-end. This work will blend data governance, AI product management, and operating model design.
In other words, curators will curate the data sets that are used to train the AI that the company uses in its operations. Curators will be the programmers behind their company's AI-driven operating system.
#2: Chief Optimization Officer
Today, most AI projects are set up to fail. That's because companies are starting from the standpoint of, "Where can we use AI?" rather than from the standpoint of, "What metric am I optimizing for, and can AI help?"
But over the next few years, this will stabilize. For instance, companies will remember that their core sales metrics are things like quarterly revenue, win rate, and deal cycle time rather than how much AI is in the sales tool stack. As this happens, companies will figure out 1) which AI tools help them with their metrics, and 2) where those tools should be used. In other words, companies will begin to optimize their performance using a combination of people and AI.
Chief Optimization Officers will be experts in AI-backed process design. They will be technical operations experts who understand the metrics that guide their function and build AI-backed workflows designed to optimize performance. They will manage hybrid teams of people and AI agents.
Eventually, I think the Chief Optimization Officer will be a senior executive, reporting to the CEO or COO. But before we get there, I expect that individual functions (sales, HR, finance, legal, etc) will embed optimization leaders within their ops teams.
#3: Head of Workforce Orchestration
Increasingly, corporate work is becoming fractional in nature. Knowledge workers were already becoming gig workers before AI hit mainstream corporate environments, but the use of AI will accelerate this trend. Over time, companies will need new, flexible staffing models. At any given time, a single team might contain workers who are full-time, part-time, project-based contractors, and agentic AI.
Because the landscape is changing so quickly, right now, teams are figuring this out as they go. There are no best practices to follow and few companies are comparing notes. But over time, clearer organizing principles will emerge about how to organize and manage these hybrid teams.
The Head of Workforce Orchestration will be responsible for blending full-time, part-time, gig, and AI agent contributors into coherent teams at the company level. They will ensure continuity of productivity, knowledge, and culture, even with rotating contributors.
It's hard to conduct a coherent piece of music when the players are moving in and out of the orchestra. This job will be more difficult than it sounds.
The bottom line: I know "Curator" is little provocative. I may have the specific titles wrong. But I'm confident these job descriptions are coming for companies that are making AI a central part of their company operating systems. The layoff headlines may get all the clicks, but the emergence of these new roles will define the shape of what is to come.
Are you seeing any of these roles already? What other new jobs do you see emerging?
Kieran
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