Buying AI technology is one decision. Changing how people work with it requires many more:
Which tasks should change? What people will become responsible for? How they will learn to work differently?
For Robyn Tombacher, EVP Global Business Transformation & IMO Operations at Warner Bros. Discovery, connecting those decisions is central to the job. Her career has moved from digital production through operations and into the people function, before returning to business transformation. She understands change from the perspective of both the person designing it and the person expected to make it work.
In her conversation on The Work Blueprint with Siobhan Savage, CEO and Co-Founder of Reejig, Robyn described an approach that brings employees into work redesign itself - and connects changes in workflows to the skills, expectations and support people need.
Robyn sees a familiar challenge in large organizations: companies buy AI tools, but don’t always rethink how people will use them in their day-to-day work.
For her, the starting point is understanding where AI could make a meaningful difference. Which processes could work better? How would people’s responsibilities change? And what would a better result look like for the business?
That focus drew her to Reejig: the ability to understand where AI could help and what that would mean for the work and the people doing it.
The next step is redesigning those workflows with clear roles and responsibilities, so people know how to put the technology to use. Success depends on whether it helps them deliver better results.
Across mergers, integrations and technology deployments, Robyn has learned that a strong strategy still depends on people helping to put it into practice.
For changes at a global scale, she describes bringing different voices into a task force to shape the approach. Participants can then explain to colleagues how their needs were considered and why particular decisions were made.
That gives participation a purpose beyond consultation. Employees help shape the work, and their involvement can build trust in the resulting changes. Drawing on her career, Robyn sees that trust as part of what allows an organization to deliver on its plans.
Asked how she would structure an internal team for AI work design, Robyn recommends bringing together technology specialists, HR professionals who understand roles and skills, and people experienced in redesigning processes.
That team would work directly with employees and leaders across the business to understand how work gets done and design changes together.
She recommends testing those changes in short cycles, reviewing what works and adjusting along the way. The team’s responsibility would extend into helping people put the new ways of working into practice.
Robyn’s spreadsheet example captures what this could mean for an employee. If producing a spreadsheet is handled for them, their contribution could shift toward checking the output, developing insights and anticipating what comes next.
That is a change in responsibility requiring expertise, judgment and clear expectations.
She anticipates more people managing outputs, even when they do not manage other employees. Performance conversations would consequently need to focus more on what someone helped achieve than on the tasks they completed.
Leaders and managers have a role in explaining the new way of working. HR can help clarify the changed role, the skills someone already has and the skills they need to develop.
For Robyn, investment in a new process needs to be accompanied by investment in the employee expected to use it. People need resources and support to take on those responsibilities - not simply a revised expectation.
Robyn’s test for progress is whether redesigned work improves business performance. The ambition is to connect investment to results, with enough visibility to understand what is changing and adjust what is not working.
She sees particular promise in better, more timely insights: helping leaders anticipate problems instead of only reviewing what happened last month. She also argues for an ongoing approach to redesign, drawing on her experience of digital development moving from fixed delivery stages toward continuous iteration.
Building that approach requires sustained leadership support, people and funding. It also gives HR business partners and talent advisors an important role, because they understand employees, development needs and how work happens.
Robyn’s leadership implication is specific: when a workflow changes, the conversation about someone’s role, contribution and development needs to happen with it. Bringing employees into the design helps connect those decisions from the beginning.
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