The Human in the Middle

Still figuring out where they fit.

Forget the big dramatic "AI is replacing jobs" headline. That's too simple and honestly a little boring at this point. Same for 'Not AI will replace you, but the one's who will work with AI'. That would be like saying 'Who is using E-Mails or Slack will replace you'. AI is a given and it is and will be everywhere.

But something more subtle. More human. And more substantial is emerging.

It's in the moment an employee opens their laptop in the morning, starts their workflow, and realizes somewhere between their second coffee and their third LLM interaction that the most productive "colleague" on their team today might not be a person, but the agents who show up in new team dynamics.

Nobody announced the new teammate. Nobody onboarded them into the existing reality as we know it. And no one trained you for this new reality. It just showed up.

Probably somebody 'asked' how they (the agent) felt about it, but did they ask you too?

Once purpose was a big topic and via the famous Aristotle's research by Google we all know meaning making and identity are crucial for employee motivation. But did you ever had the space to ask: What exactly am I here for?

This Isn't New. But It's Never Been This Fast.

Every industrial shift in history has done this to workers.

The loom. The assembly line. The spreadsheet. The internet. Agile. Each wave came with the same cocktail: genuine efficiency gains, real human displacement, a messy transition period where the old identity didn't fit anymore and the new one hadn't been invented yet.

What's different now is the surface area of disruption.

Previous waves hit specific roles. Specific industries. This one is hitting for sure blue collar workers but also cognitive work which means it's hitting almost everyone, almost simultaneously, across almost every sector.

The assembly line worker and the senior analyst are, for the first time, in roughly the same moment of reckoning.

That has never happened before. And I believe we are nowhere near ready for it; organizationally, culturally, psychological, evolutionary or as leaders.

The Three Employees I Keep Meeting

In every organization, if it's in Germany or here in the US, I walk through right now, I meet some version of these three people.

The Accelerator. She figured it out fast. She's using agents to do in two hours what used to take two days. She's producing more, thinking bigger, and quietly becoming indispensable, not because she works harder but because she works differently. She's a little evangelical about it. Sometimes annoyingly so. But she's onto something.

The Skeptic. He's not wrong, exactly. He's watched enough technology hype cycles to know that the shiny thing usually has a shadow. He's asking the questions that need to be asked about quality, about accountability, about what gets lost when you automate judgment. The organization needs him. But it's not to often listening.

The Frozen. She wants to engage. She's not resistant by nature. But nobody has given her a safe place to be a beginner. The learning curve feels steep and public and the culture doesn't reward uncertainty and not knowing. So she's performing competence while quietly falling behind. She knows it and she still stays silent.

Every organization has all three. The question is: which one does your culture reward?

Because right now, most organizations are accidentally rewarding the Accelerator, ignoring the Skeptic, and abandoning the Frozen.

In REWIRED I write about it in more detail and some of you have seen my little x-mas quiz which is more relevant than ever.

It's to important, so I mention it again. AI is not a tech transformation, but a cultural reset. Organizational change fails in design, not people fail. And the best way as leaders or during your leadership development programs is to focus on things like Theory U by Otto Schamer or the Change Curve by Kuebler-Ross to move human behavior, needs and concerns into your center of attention. To tackle this transition transactional to just employ speed of agents into your org-chart is not the smartest move long-term.

The UX of Work Just Changed And Nobody Redesigned the Employee Experience

Here's the thread that connects this series of my newsletter publications in March around the topic of AI agents.

We talked about the customer journey being bypassed by agents. The external UX dissolving and reforming around something more structural, more architectural, less emotional.

We talked about leaders needing to stop managing outputs and start designing conditions. The shift from control to architecture and orchestrating.

And here, at the employee layer, the same transformation is happening from the inside.

The UX of work (how a person navigates their day, finds information, makes decisions, collaborates, creates, contributes) is being restructured by AI agents whether organizations designed for it or not.

Because the internal systems were built for human navigation. Slow, linear, forgiving of friction. A person can tolerate a clunky intranet. A person can bridge the gap between two disconnected databases with a workaround and a sticky note.

An AI agent can't. And a human working with an AI agent now feels that friction at a completely different intensity.

The data silos your organization never got around to fixing? Your employees are now hitting them at machine speed.

The undocumented institutional knowledge that lives in someone's head and never made it into any system? The agent can't find it. And neither can the new hire who replaced the person who left.

The approval workflows designed for a world of weekly meetings and quarterly reviews? They're creating bottlenecks in a world where an agent can draft, iterate, and be ready to ship before the meeting invite has been accepted.

The employee experience is breaking, not because AI is too powerful, but because the architecture underneath it is too old.

What Employees Actually Need Right Now

Not another training. Not a prompt engineering workshop. Not a "responsible AI use policy" PDF nobody reads.

Here's what I'm seeing actually move the needle:

Permission to be a beginner. Publicly, from leadership. Out loud. The organizations where people are genuinely experimenting are the ones where a senior leader said "I'm learning too, and it's okay to not have this figured out." That single cultural permission unlocks more than any L&D program.

Clarity on what stays human. Not in a defensive way. In a design way. What decisions require human judgment, human empathy, human accountability? Defining this isn't about protecting jobs. It's about giving people a meaningful role in the new system. People can work alongside agents just fine when they know what they are uniquely there for.

Feedback loops, not just outputs. Agents are fast. Humans need rhythm, reflection, iteration, meaning-making. The organizations getting this right are building in deliberate human checkpoints. Not to slow things down. To keep the human in the loop in a way that actually matters.

And honestly in the conversation. Most employees are carrying this quietly. The uncertainty, the identity shift, the unspoken competition. Just making space for that in team meetings, in 1:1s, in how leaders talk about the transition changes something. Not everything. But something real.

The Design Thinking Frame I Keep Coming Back To

At the d.school, the deepest skill we practiced wasn't prototyping or ideation. It was reframing.

Taking the problem someone handed you and asking: Is this actually the problem? Or is it a symptom of something upstream?

The organizations framing this as "how do we upskill our employees for AI" are solving the wrong problem.

The more substantial question is: how do we redesign work itself? The workflows, the systems, the culture, the definitions of contribution and value for a world where intelligence is distributed between humans and agents? And each entity is part of a larger ecosystem and therefore each individual (in the job or out of the job) brings meaning to the cycle of life.

That's a design challenge in an evolutionary context. And mostly it's still human-centered. The agent infrastructure is a tool, but the hybrid co-context depends on humans. With the employee not as the recipient of the transformation, but as the co-designer of it.

The organizations that figure that out in 2026 will have an advantage that no amount of AI tooling can replicate. Because the tooling is available to everyone. And more and more will be automated and simplified.

The culture of genuine human-agent collaboration has to be consciously built. Slowly and carefully with people and not at them.

The Thought Leaders I'm Aligned With

Lynda Gratton (London Business School) — her work on the future of work is grounded, longitudinal, and refreshingly non-hype. Her thinking on energy rather than just time as the scarce human resource is particularly relevant right now.

Daniel Pink — autonomy, mastery, purpose. The motivation framework hasn't changed. But what mastery means in an AI-augmented role has completely shifted. He hasn't written this book yet. Someone should. (Ups yes, I did, partially in REWIRED;-)

Brené Brown — stay with me. Vulnerability and psychological safety aren't soft skills in the agent era. They're the infrastructure for the learning culture employees desperately need right now. The Skeptic and the Frozen don't thrive without them.

Henrik Kniberg — for the agile and self-organization thread. His work on autonomous teams at Spotify is a prototype worth revisiting through an AI-augmented lens.

And the researchers at MIT Sloan's Work of the Future task force — the most rigorous longitudinal data on what's actually happening to workers. Less hot take, more ground truth.

And of course my fabulous co-creators at REWIRED such as Doug Kirkpatrick, the driving force at Morning Star and an expert in Open Space Technology.

The Question I'm Sitting With

I keep thinking about my daughter.

Besides her Gynmasium in Düsseldorf where we still experiencing print out after print out and one linear problem solving equation after another, she's also growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, enrolled in a (public) school where most systems are already half-automated. The forms, the scheduling, the communication, the homework, most of it touched by agents before a human ever sees it (so the teachers actually have time for the kids).

She's going to enter a workforce in a few years where working alongside AI is as unremarkable as using a spreadsheet or snapchat.

The question isn't whether she'll adapt. She will — kids always do. The question is what we're building for her to step into.

Are we designing organizations where humans and agents bring out the best in each other? Where the work left for humans is genuinely meaningful, genuinely creative, genuinely human connected? And will our entities solve the challenges of the world or rather fuel consume and convenience?

Or are we just automating the old system with all its hierarchy, biases, antiquated patterns and narratives, its silos and its performance theater and calling it transformation?!

As a mother that second option is not an option for me. That's not a future I'm interested in building. And I suspect you're not either.

The Loop on This Series with three layers so far

The customer — behavior has changed and will further rapidly. The UX journey with humans in the loop has been bypassed. The architecture is what matters now and the human at the end closing the deal.

The leader — control was always an illusion. The job is designing conditions. The agent era just made that undeniable. Hybrid has a new definition and leadership is more than ever human-centric.

The employee — the human in the middle. Not a problem to be managed. The employee is more than ever self-organized and responsible. A co-designer of what comes next with the decision what stays innately human.

None of this is a technology story. It never was.

It's an organizational design story. A culture story. A what kind of future do we actually want to build story.

And that story needs humans at the center of it who are curious, awake, a little uncomfortable, and unwilling to outsource the important questions to an agent.

Even a very good one.

If this 'UX agent' series landed, share it with someone who's wrestling with it. And if you want to go deeper inside your organization, I'd love that conversation.

Give the gift of Rewired — Leadership in the Age of AI to your leaders, because the rewiring starts with the people, not the platform. https://www.amazon.com/Rewired-Leadership-Practical-Future-Proof-Human-Centric-ebook/dp/B0GL3PJTRR

Stay up to date on our upcoming podcast https://tinyurl.com/u7yvwdb7

Check out resources such as the 7 C's Model on our website https://www.futureofleadership.salon/rewired

Ans overall, stay healthy and optimistic. Sharing is Caring!

With a fierce mind, a kind heart and brave spirit sending you inspiration from California embracing the spring weather and long hikes, optimistic that we humans get it right.