Happy Tuesday, everyone. I'm Frank Richardson, an organisational psychologist observing the workplace with curiosity and care. Each week, I share insights to help HR leaders better understand the people behind the processes and build cultures where both individuals and organisations can thrive.
This week in workplace whiplash 🌀
📉 The economy shed 23,000 jobs in July. Economists expected 83,000 new ones.
The BLS report landed last Friday and rattled markets. Government payrolls contracted by 53,000. Prior months were revised down by a combined 103,000. The unemployment rate dropped to 4.1%. Make that make sense.🤖 Employees now spend a full workday a week supervising AI
Glean's latest report found workers are spending nearly 40% of their AI time fixing mistakes, checking outputs, and re-prompting until something usable comes out. The technology built to save time has created a new job category: minding the machine.
🔁 The AI rehire is real
Ford, IBM, and Commonwealth Bank have all reversed AI-driven redundancies after automation failed to deliver. A separate survey found 55% of leaders who made AI layoffs now say they got it wrong. Efficiency first, consequences second.
💳 Visa is cutting 2,600 roles to get "the right skills"
The memo announcing Visa's latest round of cuts says the company needs to ensure it has "the right roles and skills" going forward. It does not say what those skills are, or why the 2,600 people leaving don't have them.
🤝 In partnership with Leapsome
Most hiring context disappears the day someone signs their offer. Leapsome Recruiting, our new ATS now in early access, keeps it. Interview scorecards, competencies, everything you learned about a candidate carries straight into onboarding, and their first review, and performance data flows back into who you hire next. It's AI that raises your talent density, built on the deepest people data foundation in HR: the only closed loop in HR, connecting hiring to everything that comes after.
If you've ever managed, or even just worked on a project, you'll know exactly how scope creep works.
The brief starts out beautifully simple. Then someone says, "while we're at it..." Another person asks for "one tiny addition." A stakeholder remembers something they forgot to mention three weeks ago. Suddenly you're delivering something twice the size of the original project while everyone insists they only asked for a couple of small changes.
I've started wondering whether AI is doing exactly the same thing to our jobs.
This week I came across an article in HR Dive reporting that almost 70% of HR professionals' ChatGPT conversations are about work outside traditional HR responsibilities. HR professionals are increasingly using AI to help with marketing, finance, engineering and other work that would once have sat with a different team.
The article made me pause because I recognised myself immediately.
A few years ago, if someone had asked me to analyse a spreadsheet full of data, I would have politely wandered off in search of someone much smarter than me. These days I'll happily throw it into ChatGPT, ask questions, explore patterns and build charts.
Nothing in my job description has changed, but the work I'm capable of doing absolutely has.
🧠The behavioural science lens
AI changes what people are capable of doing, and capability has a habit of changing expectations:
Today's innovation quickly becomes tomorrow's baseline. Organisational psychologists have long observed that people adapt remarkably quickly to new capabilities. Tasks that once felt specialised soon become ordinary once the tools become easier to use. AI has lowered the barrier to analysing data, creating presentations and interpreting financial information, so those activities increasingly feel like a normal part of many roles rather than work that belongs somewhere else.
New capacity has a habit of attracting new work. Parkinson's Law describes how work expands to fill the time and resources available. The same pattern often appears when technology creates extra capacity. A task that once took two hours now takes twenty minutes, creating room for another request, another project or another responsibility. Over time, the role quietly grows even though nobody consciously set out to redesign it.
Role boundaries become increasingly blurred. The HR Dive article found HR professionals using ChatGPT for work that traditionally sat with marketing, finance and engineering. AI makes it much easier to step into another discipline for "just one task". Those small requests accumulate surprisingly quickly, gradually changing what organisations consider to be part of the role.
🚀What this means for leaders
Job descriptions usually stay still while expectations quietly keep moving:
Review roles as often as you review performance. Looking back over six or twelve months often reveals responsibilities that have gradually accumulated without anyone consciously deciding they belonged there. That conversation creates a much clearer picture of the role than the original position description ever could.
Capability deserves recognition as well as responsibility. Learning new skills creates enormous value for organisations, particularly when AI helps people solve problems they couldn't tackle before. Those changes deserve conversations about priorities, workload and career development, rather than quietly becoming the new baseline.
Growth happens best when people have room to grow. Expanding someone's role can be energising, challenging and deeply rewarding. Expanding it every time technology creates a little more capacity eventually produces something very different.
Has AI changed what people expect from your job?
💬 Final thoughts
Project managers have spent decades wrestling with scope creep. But I have a feeling leaders are about to spend the next decade wrestling with job creep.
Every additional task makes perfect sense when you look at it on its own. That's exactly why it's so difficult to spot while it's happening. Then one day you catch yourself building dashboards, editing videos, analysing financial data and writing communications for three different teams.
AI is making many of us far more capable than we were a year ago. The organisations that benefit most will be the ones that redesign jobs deliberately, instead of allowing them to expand one request at a time.
How's the depth of today's edition?
If something here speaks to you, I’d love to hear it.
Frank
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