The Other Six Percent

IBM's AI system now closes 94% of the roughly 10 million HR requests that come through it each year. That's not a small number, and I don't think it should be waved away.

What stopped me was the other 6%. Not a rounding error — situations that needed a kind of judgment no model has learned to carry yet. Instead of quietly automating around that gap, IBM's head of HR announced the company would triple its entry-level hiring in the U.S. Her reasoning, more or less: if you stop bringing people in now, there's no one ready in 3-5 years, when the well the company has been drawing from finally runs dry.

I've watched a version of this decision play out for years, long before anyone was talking about AI this way. A leader gets a tool that handles 90-some percent of what used to eat their week, and the temptation is always the same — shrink the team, keep the margin, call it efficiency. IBM did the opposite. They looked at the 6%, the part that still needed a person, and invested in the people who would be ready to stand in it.

That's the argument of my book, really, showing up in one HR decision: AI's job was never to do the mission. It was to make enough room that the mission could still be attempted by someone who was actually there.

What's the 6% in your organization — and who are you making sure is ready to stand in it?

From Dancing in the Wind: An Adaptive Leadership Framework in the Age of AI.