How Josh Newman is turning 55,000 job titles into 600 roles

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Josh Newman
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3 mins

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Advertising · Marketing · Communications

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Meet Jasmine Jaco, VP, Organization Transformation & HR Strategy at Boston Scientific

Jasmine spent most of her career in management consulting, leading large-scale global transformations anchored in business strategy and value delivery. Along the way she launched startups and built an experience innovation practice.

At Boston Scientific she leads AI organization transformation, covering work and role redesign, and is building the HR capabilities needed to lead that change across the business.

 

The initial estimate looked promising: AI agents could free up around four hours a week for each sales representative. Then Boston Scientific’s team sat down with the people actually doing the work.


Customer preparation involved information the proposed agent hadn’t accounted for. Some of the administrative work included in the savings calculation wasn’t happening consistently in the first place. For Jasmine, the experience showed why understanding work matters before making promises about what AI will improve.

Getting close enough to understand the work

One early lesson was about scope. Trying to address the entire enterprise at once would stretch limited expertise too thin. A meaningful area of work offered somewhere to learn, refine the approach and demonstrate what redesign could accomplish.

Sales provided a revealing example. The team examined preparing for customer calls, conducting them and documenting interactions in the CRM. But job descriptions and high-level conversations could only take them so far. They described broad responsibilities without revealing the information, systems and individual practices involved.

Letting employees test the assumptions

Working with Reejig, Boston Scientific looked beyond job descriptions to how work actually happened. Breaking the work into tasks and subtasks, alongside the people doing it every day, changed the picture.

Sales reps prepared for calls using information scattered across different places, including their own phones, so the initial agent couldn’t give them everything they needed. Many reps also weren’t consistently recording meetings in the CRM. The estimate had counted savings against work that, in some cases, wasn’t being done, and requiring that documentation could actually add time.

Employees’ knowledge exposed gaps in both the workflow and its business case. The progress was a clearer understanding of what needed to change and which assumptions could withstand scrutiny.

Making room for judgment in the redesigned workflow

Jasmine is also helping teams account for the work AI creates: reviewing outputs, applying judgment, correcting problems and remaining accountable for the result. Under pressure to show productivity gains, those steps are easy to compress or skip.

People also need experience to recognize when an output is wrong, so decisions about what to automate need to consider how employees build that expertise. Research and presentations can generate interest, but practical examples make work design tangible.



Proof points create belief.


 

 

The transformation story

How WPP moved from 55,000 job titles to 600, unlocking 25% capacity gains

The board’s question required a deeper view

With 55,000 unique job titles across a decentralized business, leaders needed a clearer view of the tasks people performed.

Connect roles to the work with Reejig

WPP simplified 55,000 job titles into 600 role archetypes, combining an internal language model with Reejig’s work intelligence to connect roles, tasks, skills and AI tools.

Test the recommendations against real work

WPP examined 600 roles across 50 business areas covering more than 84,000 employees, with leaders validating recommendations against actual workflows.

“Role redesign was already beginning in parts of WPP.”
Make more room for meaningful client work

Examining which tasks AI could support helps reduce repetitive effort and give people more time for the work they joined WPP to do.

“The goal is more purpose-driven work and better client outcomes.”
What’s next: rethink the employee journey

WPP is exploring how AI could change career paths, including rotational programs that expose junior employees to higher-level work, and how to help clients prepare for a redesigned agency workforce.

What other leaders can take from this

Lessons for leaders

01
Look beneath job titles
Tasks, not titles, answer the board’s question about the future shape of the business.
02
Make guidance usable in context
Validated, role-specific playbooks tied to real workflows are what leaders act on.
03
Design time for judgment
Understanding the work earns people leaders a seat in redesign conversations.

Behind the transformation

How Josh worked with Reejig to move from 55,000 job titles to 600 role archetypes validated against real workflows.

The work that we’ve done together has given us the insights and credibility that we might not have had in the past to have that work architecture, business model redesign conversation.

Josh Newman WPP
Learn how leaders like Josh use Reejig to understand work, prove value and scale AI work design. Book a demo →