For Santosh Singh, understanding how work changes and helping people develop belong in the same conversation.
At DENSO, that meant building a detailed picture of what people actually do. Skills-based career planning needed a connection to the work itself: the tasks, responsibilities and decisions that would shape what employees needed to learn next.
As Senior Vice President, Corporate Functions: HR, Legal, Corporate Communications, Santosh was helping establish that foundation in North America. In his conversation on The Work Blueprint with Siobhan Savage of Reejig, he described an approach connecting work architecture, AI work design and career development.
His starting question puts the purpose of that work plainly: “Of course, there's efficiency to be gained, but towards what end?”
Santosh’s perspective developed long before this AI work began. An engineer by training, he spent six to seven months early in his career on a production floor, building a machine from its individual parts.
The experience taught him to combine technical knowledge with the expertise of the people doing the work. Later roles across process improvement, business transformation and HR reinforced that connection.
He points to the manufacturing principle of genchi genbutsu: going to the place of work to observe and understand what is happening. An experienced person can notice an abnormality that a performance measure alone might miss.
That ability matters in work supported by AI. For Santosh, judgment and discernment are skills organizations need to develop deliberately. People need practical experience, an understanding of why work happens and opportunities to test their observations against reality.
Build the foundation with the people who know it
DENSO began with pilots in a couple of functions, working with leaders and practitioners to define work at task and subtask level. Reejig supported that process.
Validation was central. Leaders checked whether the descriptions reflected what employees actually did and the effort involved. This gave the business a direct role in shaping the information that would inform later decisions.
The participation mattered as much as the detail. People familiar with the work could challenge the descriptions, confirm what was accurate and help establish a shared understanding before redesign moved further.
Mapping tasks opened up a larger question: how should work happen across the organization?
Santosh described DENSO’s intention to extend the exercise into other functions and examine how their work connects. Improving an isolated task could miss the delays, dependencies or unnecessary effort elsewhere in the process.
His process improvement background offered a method: define the problem, validate it, understand the causes, make improvements and establish ownership for what happens afterward. AI could support a solution developed by the people who understood the problem.
The design also needed to make responsibilities explicit. Where would people lead? Where would they supervise AI-supported tasks? Where could people and AI create something together?
Those decisions would shape both the work and the support employees needed to do it well. Santosh saw an opportunity to use improved efficiency to invest in people and reskilling.
The next step was to translate the task and subtask information into job profiles and career pathways.
DENSO was also working to add a five-year strategic workforce planning view. Comparing existing work and skills with the organization’s direction would help identify where AI could support work and where employees would need to build or develop skills.
This would strengthen an existing development approach. Santosh described how DENSO used skills mapping and individual development plans as its industry evolved, including toward more software-defined vehicles.
Work architecture could make those plans more specific by clarifying the skills expected. It could also help employees understand why particular development mattered and how it connected to where the business was going.
At the time of the conversation, activating career pathways for functions that had completed the foundational work was a priority.
For Santosh, sharing insight about changing work depends on how people have been involved.
Asked whether employees should see task-level information, he emphasized bringing them into the problem-solving journey and explaining its purpose. With that trust established, people could use the insight to make decisions and contribute ideas.
“This is a trust curve,” he said.
His concern also extends to the next generation: how will people develop judgment if they lack opportunities to practice, observe and solve problems?
That question gives leaders a concrete responsibility. As they redesign work, they also need to design the experiences and development that prepare people to lead it. At DENSO, connecting work architecture with career planning is the foundation Santosh is building toward that goal.
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