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Liz Jamieson is a global talent and operations leader with over 15 years of experience in driving organizational growth and transformation across APAC, EMEA, and global markets. She is the founder of LJ People, specializing in work automation and workforce design, and has a proven track record in building and scaling operations, strategic planning, and change management. Her expertise in automation and organizational design makes her a valuable resource for modern workforce challenges. Learn more about her on her expert page.
Liz Jamieson, founder of LJ People and former Head of Talent Acquisition at Amazon APAC, joins the Org Design Podcast to explore the emerging field of workforce architecture that integrates AI agents alongside human employees. Drawing on her 15 years of recruitment experience across 7,000 hires, Liz shares how organizations can strategically plan for a hybrid workforce where AI agents are managed similarly to human employees—complete with onboarding, training, performance reviews, and optimization.
The conversation covers practical steps for mapping workflows, identifying automation opportunities, and deploying AI agents while maintaining transparency with teams. Liz introduces the concept of "Intelligence Resources" (IR) as an evolution of Human Resources, discusses the risks of shadow AI usage, and explains why org design is becoming everyone's responsibility as employees become "agent bosses." She emphasizes that AI augments rather than replaces human work, shifting focus to validation, collaboration, and critical thinking while agents handle repetitive tasks.
Key topics include: workflow mapping as the foundation for agentic deployment, the need for enterprise-level AI governance, the emergence of Chief AI Officer roles, and why frontier firms are already seeing gains from strategic AI integration in their workforce planning.
[00:00:00] Tim Brewer: Hi, welcome to the Org Design Podcast. It's Tim Brewer, one of the co-hosts. I'm lucky enough to have Amy Springer with me here again today. And we have Liz Jamieson from LJ people coming to us from Cairns, Australia. If you are listening from somewhere else in the world, Cairns is one of the most beautiful and visited places in Australia up near the Daintree Rainforest. Liz, thank you for joining us today on the Org Design Podcast.
[00:00:27] Liz Jamieson: Hi guys. So good to be here. Thank you.
[00:00:31] Tim Brewer: Such a pleasure to have you on. We've been lucky enough to chat previously so I'm really looking forward to today's conversation. But before we get going, how did you end up involved in strategic workforce planning and org design? Is it something you grew up thinking, oh, I'm definitely gonna end up in this realm. Tell us about that journey.
[00:00:48] Liz Jamieson: Yeah, so I spent 15 years in recruitment, so I have been exposed to almost every role imaginable i n the workforce in any type of workforce, public and private sector all over the world. Seven of those years was actually at Amazon as the Head of Talent Acquisition for several countries in APAC. We contributed to 7,000 hires in that time. So you can imagine that's a lot of different roles that I know how to recruit, I know the ins and outs and the details of what's required from a human to do those types of roles. So I finished up there earlier this year and then I serendipitously attended an innovation festival where I learned about AI agents. And that really sparked, initially a personal curiosity, which morphed into a professional curiosity. And then I thought I could fuse my knowledge of all of the human roles that I know from all of my 15 years in recruiting with what agents can do, now that I know that part too. And that's how workforce architecture, what I was calling it became my version of org design. And today, now I help businesses to architect their workforces mixed with humans and AI agents to thrive and survive in this new era of work that we're all in and we're all feeling.
[00:02:18] Tim Brewer: Yeah, it's super interesting and definitely something that is emerging at a very rapid rate. When you are thinking about this kind of new hybrid workforce, so we're all familiar with strategic workforce planning and traditional org design, where there's only humans on the org chart. What parallels do you see from your work, hiring people, performance, reviewing people, ensuring that the right people are in the right seats in an organization. What are the parallels that you see that we're gonna need develop capabilities in industry around managing these agentic roles within a business?
[00:02:52] Liz Jamieson: Yeah, agentic employees need to be treated almost the same as human employees in terms of all of that HR support. I think there's a movement now for that function or a new function to be intelligence resources. And that is the mix of intelligence of humans and also intelligence of agents.
So let's say it used to be HR but IR. So IR function needs to manage digital employees in a very similar way. You have to map out what work needs to be done. Just like you would to create a role for a human, you need to then go and find the right person for that role, which would be creating the right prompts, going to the right platforms, and making sure that you are hiring the right digital employee.
Then the onboarding is super critical, just like it is for humans. We need to train agents very intentionally and keep training them as well and think of them as a very smart intern. So all of the HR things you need to do to support us, very smart intern, you're gonna have to do with your digital employees. We also have to track progress, measure, retrain,
[00:04:13] Tim Brewer: performance reviews?
[00:04:14] Liz Jamieson: ROI. Exactly. Performance reviews, make sure that they're doing what we need to be them to be doing.
And all of that kind of goes the whole way through the lifecycle, I would say. But there are some key differences, which is that they don't need to sleep, they don't need leave, and so on. So I think a lot of the ways we treat the digital employees is very similar. And there's just only a few differences honestly.
[00:04:38] Tim Brewer: Yeah. I think you've talked about that lead in as you plan a workforce that has agents within it and performance review. I wonder we obviously have a lot of people we talk to about changing the shape of the workforce, and while it's not an initial problem, I think we're also gonna end up similar to those other types of responsibilities or workload that we need inside an organization to manage agents. You'll have, you know if you're restructuring or building out a new product or changing the way the product operates, you need to go through the same change with digital agents and know, where that work has been done in the organization, even if it's on an unconstrained, like a non FTE basis, all the way to decommissioning or transitioning agents out of production as well, which is gonna change the way people think about workforce planning overall. So that's in a perfect world or in a future where you have a plan, and I know you are working with some of your customers to do this on their workforce where agentic roles fit in a workforce, and how do you plan for that. What's actually happening when you talk to, leaders in organizations today, are people taking that kind of planned, strategic approach, approach to a hybrid workforce?
[00:05:58] Liz Jamieson: Yeah, I mean it's, it varies on the leader and the leaders who really see it as an org wide strategy change are typically the most successful because they see agentic u pskilling as not just one IT team's job, it is every single employee in the business has to have the skills to be their own agent bosses, right?
So org design is everybody's job and it will become that point where humans are overseeing agents. We are the human bosses of the agents, and everyone is an org designer in your own little space, even if you're an individual contributor, you'll need to design your organization of agents.
So it's not just IT's responsibility to put in AI in the workforce. The leaders who really see it as an entire organization shift, strategy shift are doing it the best.
Those are rare though, I have to say, from what I've seen. A lot of it is that grassroots, silent AI use. Where employees are using AI silently or quite secretly to do their jobs because organization just hasn't got the right approach to bringing it into an enterprise level
[00:07:21] Tim Brewer: Yeah, so over these coming years, what risks are created when you aren't intentional about how AI's rolling out across the organization? How can it go wrong if you don't have governance in place? If you don't have a strategy in place? What risks have been secretly created? We used to call it a tumor organization, where you have a team of people being hired in a part of the organization 'cause there weren't good controls in place that mimics a team somewhere else, that a team may not have known existed. I guess that could be happening across many organizations, but like you said, silently and secret, not intentionally secretively, but happening with agents being deployed. What could go wrong if that's not done right?
[00:08:04] Liz Jamieson: Yeah, we hear a lot about the doom and gloom, but I think that we should be taking risks and calculated risks that we have decided that yes, we will accept that calculated risk. And there is a lot of positive to be learned in this space.
Of course, there's a lot that can go wrong and and you hear it in the news every day. There's businesses that either they were hacked into maliciously by AI agents who were trained to act as certain bad actors or internally, if you don't have an enterprise AI system with the right firewalls and governance, then of course if you've got employees just using their own personal chat GPT account accidentally putting in, names and identifiable information that happens. I think it is happening quite a bit. Because shadow AI is so prevalent, there was a statistic on it's, the majority of employees are using it in their workplace and they don't have the right enterprise agreements. You just have to listen to the news or listen to a podcast to hear about the doom and gloom.
But Tim, I really wanna encourage people that it's okay, as long as you go with the right platforms and you are happy with their level of security, it's okay to start dabbling and experimenting with what AI can do for your workflows.
[00:09:27] Tim Brewer: Yeah, so to be specific, a lot of our audience is in the people game, not in the technology game, although there is a lot of crossover. when you upload work documents to those systems or you upload spreadsheets to those systems, if they contain information that's not normally accessible outside of the organization, they start forming a part of the models training. Correct. Whereas when you have the right enterprise agreements or working with the right tools, they do not use the information you're interacting with. And that could be, just strategically relevant, like financial documents or current financials. I've seen people upload customer lists or, and PII data, particularly in people, if you're uploading and using those models in a private context or don't have the right licensing you're actually, it's creating a bit of a problem on the PII front.
[00:10:19] Liz Jamieson: Yeah, I would definitely say there are models now personal, not enterprise, that you can also switch off the ability for it to train the model. So that is always evolving, and I think by the time people listen to this, that should be easily accessible where you can turn that off in your own personal account because in reality, it's not realistic that all businesses are gonna have an enterprise level AI platform at in time for all their employees to use it.
It's gonna take a lot. It could take years, the Microsoft World Trend Index thinks that it will take years until organizations are at the point where humans and agents are, in the same teams, in the same org. I think we have to use what we can and in our personal chats, just make sure that you turn off, that it feeds the model if possible.
[00:11:13] Amy Springer: Keeping it practical, but stepping it back a little bit in the process. Liz, you mentioned earlier that there's the people you are interacting with that have always had this sense of strategic organization design. Thinking about what work needs to be done to achieve their goals and who's doing them, and they're embracing agentic roles more easily.
We know that there's still many, many, many people where it hasn't been a natural instinct. Firstly, are you seeing that the introduction of AI is almost forcing people to actually ask that question," oh wait, what work do we actually do here? And who do we want to be doing it?"
And also, I guess just more practically for people listening who maybe have been a bit scared to go down that path yet, if you're happy to share maybe what you do with your own clients, how do you start an engagement? And what are the steps that you've been taking to help people think about this hybrid workforce?
[00:12:13] Liz Jamieson: yeah I would say, the people who typically would come to me thinking that, oh we actually wanna do something here. They're probably involved in AI in their product in some ways. So they're actually using it in their in their business, but they actually have never thought to using their workforce.
And so those are the early adopters that I see. Microsoft calls them the frontier firms. And everyone is on a journey to be a frontier firm in their mind. But they're the early adopters because they're like, they can see how great AI is, they're probably selling it as part of their product, and now they wanna put it in their workforce.
And they're the people who are thinking, how can I leverage this? And they're not looking to get rid of humans. That's a big misconception. It's not AI replacing humans, it's AI augmenting humans so that humans can do the really important critical human work, have taste and judgment and keep that work that's really close to your competitive edge with a human. And AI just takes all of the administrative repetitive stuff off your plate.
It is making people look at their workflows because that's my first step. So for advice, for anyone out there who's looking to start, you've gotta have your good workflows mapped. Otherwise, if that's just too scrappy and not detailed enough and you try and automate it and turn it agentic, you're gonna spend so much time tweaking and fixing.
It's that rule of 90% planning, 10% execution with creating an agent as well. So my process is to work with people to discover their current workflow. Then in the second part we design the automation, which parts of those workflows should and shouldn't we automate and then we deploy as the final stage.
So that's just a kind of logical model that anyone could go and follow today. And I would just empower you to be curious and be bold to do that because a lot of businesses are already on their way and are seeing the gain from that.
[00:14:23] Tim Brewer: Yeah. When you say document the workflow, are you thinking about all of the individual roles that exist in a business, where work gets done and how that work gets done in an organization?
[00:14:36] Liz Jamieson: For a high level, if you're an org designer and you're working in your own business on that, you definitely wanna map out all your roles, and then it's also workflows within those roles. So you can get really nitty gritty and I have a business, it was a big lesson learned.
We didn't spend enough time on workflow mapping. We just roughly said. First we use this tool and then we move it to this tool, and then we send a remittance note and we actually needed to go and create three different agents instead of one. And it's that garbage in, garbage out, isn't it?
So, again, it's an employee, if you're not training your intern on every single step on clicking a browser, and where do they go? They're not gonna know how to do it. So it's exactly the same with agents. I think we all skipped ahead and we thought, "oh, they can already figure out what they need to do and teach themselves". We are not there.
[00:15:32] Tim Brewer: Coming back to the statement you made before about the new functions that need to exist within a business. We had another guest on, we have a lot of people that listen to the podcast that are leaders in organizations and curious or geek out on the design, and implementation of that design structure in their business. What are the things they need to be thinking about on their leadership team? It used to be like you'd get a CIO, but I'm with you that it's probably heading from information through to intelligence. Is that another function on their leadership team? Is that an upgrade or an addition to the function that HR takes in the organization, or is it depending, different organizations might deploy extra resources in different places to facilitate that change.
[00:16:21] Liz Jamieson: Yeah, I've had hot debates about this on loads of different webinars and chats and working groups. And some people think that, HR should go under the CTO, and HR needs to sit under tech. Some think that that tech needs to go under HR to own this space and others think that you create intelligence resources as a separate function. So what I'm doing, which is like an outsourced intelligence resources function.
I'm not managing your people. I'm not managing your IT. I'm architecting your workforce of humans and agents and who does what work and what is the correct ratio of humans to agents in your business? That is the intelligence resources function, I believe, and the human resources still needs to happen because humans still need all of the support they need and IT runs the platform, that's different again. So I see it as a separate function at the higher levels. And I think the government has just recently recommended having a Chief AI Officer as a standard C-Suite role across Australia. Again, that doesn't really cover the agentic part because that is just putting all of AI under one Chief, which I don't believe is the case. I think the org needs to have a whole AI view .
[00:17:48] Tim Brewer: From a governance perspective, I could understand why that recommendation would be there, but I think to your point, humans are more nuanced than that and org design is part art, part science in how you bring people to bear to correctly resource an organization and keep the organization in flow, and incentivized to go the right direction. I do think this is gonna be a really interesting time as we see hybrid org design or hybrid strategic workforce planning evolve.
What tools are you using? Are you using AI yourself in that analysis? What have you found is has practically worked well in, in going through this process with your customers or your clients?
[00:18:31] Liz Jamieson: Yeah, so in the discovery phase there's not much AI in that for me. It's a lot of human interaction, and really humans looking at the work and looking at the roles and the tasks and all the details. You can't really get an AI to do that. That's the whole point, is that we own the input into the next step, which is design, which is definitely where I get AI involved.
I have an AI agent that takes workflows and runs it through some global automation gradients that have been released and newer ones are coming all the time. For example, the International Labor Organization has an occupational exposure list of 400 jobs. I cross reference what my clients do with what that says, you come out with a gradient of this role has 80% automation, this role has 20. Then deploy is when you take all of that and you start creating agents. I don't use agents to create agents, but I do use platforms for that. Agentic Workforce Platforms. M365 even does a really good job of that analysis. They've got their own agents in there now. Just the Microsoft 365. They've got a research and an analyst agent. And then if you wanna create agents, there's a bunch of different ones that you can use depending on your preferences.
[00:19:56] Tim Brewer: I think this has been helpful for a lot of people who intuitively know this is coming but haven't worked out how to best execute or think about plans in their organization. One of the things that we see in traditional org design to say, human only. Is where you lead through a change and people feel some kind of threat that could be a threat for their job and that's an unfortunate reality of change where a division of a business may need to wind down or wind up. I know that there's a lot of discussion globally at the moment around how AI is going to impact the workforce and could threaten different people's jobs. Now I know you are going through it in terms of like people leading that agentic workforce. We talk a bit about that, where people get defensive or threatened. You end up finding it very difficult to implement change as a result. What are you doing to help the organizations you work with, avoid being in a situation where the team members are feeling the threat of AI? They're seeing the opportunity of AI and their ability to lead agentic workforce to make their role and their life and their work better.
[00:21:07] Liz Jamieson: Yeah. And I think transparency is always a really good way to keep trust in an organization.
So being transparent with the direction the business is taking and saying, we do wanna explore in this space. We do wanna become a frontier firm. And that's no secret. We're not a working group in secret that's looking at whose jobs it's gonna take.
We're outwardly pledging to be a frontier firm to stay competitive. But we also wanna encourage employees to use AI in their daily work and empower everybody to actually use it and show that it's an opportunity and that it will augment their work and not replace them. So I think if organizations are holding it back and not letting employees use it, of course employees are doing it anyway 'cause they're doing shadow AI. And they're also then worried about where is that gonna come out for us? At what level, is it gonna come and replace jobs or why is it taking so long? So I would say transparency and really empowering employees to use it in their day to day, encourage it.
At Amazon, Andy Jassy was very openly encouraging employees to use it. His early days, he was like, if you're not using it, you are not meeting our expectations, we want everybody using AI every single day in every team. No excuses. So it, no one felt like there was something bad coming because they were using it already in their life. Yes. There's been lots of layoffs and openly talked about the impact of AI on creating those layoffs recently, but that's business too.
We haven't figured out how to work AI into the economy yet in terms of our workforce. And so I think that's a big job for governments around the world to figure out how do we get the right balance of humans and AI doing the right things. It happened with the internet. Everything was fine. You know what I mean? Like it, it will sort itself out. But, it is a bit of a scary time, I think, for people because it's moving so fast.
[00:23:20] Tim Brewer: Thinking about how that might look in an org chart. I do think there's a day where you could have a team member looking after an unconstrained agentic workforce. So agents aren't FTE constrained, but they do deliver an equivalent amount of FTE effort. And there's time coming I think we'll see individual contributors of the past that are now wielding a small team of agents delivering 10, 15, 20 x, a hundred FTE of effort from the agents that they work with in their role. And in most businesses, that's a pretty big multiplier effect if you can have all of your best teammates that, like you said, understand the business and can understand taste and feel and talk to customers, understand how best to deploy their own agentic workforce within their role or within their type of work.
[00:24:10] Liz Jamieson: Remember and you're probably seeing it yourselves, anyone who's listening, I use AI to create things. I spend a lot of time checking and rewriting and tweaking, and still are doing almost the same amount of work. It's just different work. Whereas I used to spend the time researching and then writing and not validating because I did it myself. So I didn't need to spend hours validating my own research. Now I spend all those hours validating and checking, and so I'm still using the same amount of human effort, but I'm actually validating and also what I think we're gonna see is we're gonna see humans needing to collaborate more because agents are doing the repetitive work. But humans need to validate across teams, across functions and workers as team members to make sure that these things that go out, these reports and this product and this work is actually doing what it should do.
And you heard, you obviously heard in Australia the report that it's been labeled as work slop, which is that AI is just used without human validation. The government report and all the citations were wrong and everything like that. So I think humans are not going anywhere. We are absolutely needed and we will have plenty of work to do. It's just different work.
[00:25:33] Tim Brewer: Liz, it's been fantastic to meet you. Exciting to meet people starting to work on this new hybrid workforce approach and to be involved in strategically planning that out rather than just picking up the pieces of people deploying ghost AI everywhere across the organization. I hope this has been really helpful for people listening and other professionals in the org design and strategic workforce planning space who are starting to need to think about how does this hybrid approach work?
Amy, thank you so much for joining us as a co-host again today. Liz, if people want to contact you, what type of organizations are you typically wanting to talk to and how do they get in touch with you?
[00:26:16] Liz Jamieson: Yeah, no, I'd love a connection on LinkedIn. And if you wanna get hold of me, mostly it's those frontier firms, the ones who are really curious, they wanna start automating some of their workflows, smaller businesses at the moment because big business, you know what it's like with bureaucracy, get in touch through LinkedIn.
I have a website to ljpeople.com au. So would love to hear from you. And also just keep the conversation going on LinkedIn. Let me know if you know you're experimenting and how it's going. And we can share tips.
[00:26:47] Tim Brewer: Awesome. Liz, thank you so
[00:26:49] Amy Springer: Amazing.
[00:26:50] Tim Brewer: out there running an event, I would probably have Liz as a speaker as well. I think and I like how you are thinking about this impending challenge that's coming up for every organization and every workforce about how they have a tactical and strategic approach to bringing in an agent workforce to augment the great work that's already going on within their organizations.
[00:27:12] Liz Jamieson: All right.
[00:27:12] Tim Brewer: that's it for the Org Design Podcast. We'll be back again shortly. Liz, it's a pleasure having you on the show. Have a great week everyone.
[00:27:21] Liz Jamieson: Thanks guys. Bye.
[00:27:23] Amy Springer: Bye, Liz.
Functionly empowers organizations to adapt to the evolving landscape of work by providing tools that streamline strategic workforce planning and enhance organizational design. By effectively mapping workflows and roles, Functionly enables businesses to integrate human and AI agents seamlessly, ensuring that teams can thrive in a hybrid environment. With its intuitive platform, leaders can visualize their organizational structure, making informed decisions about resource allocation and agentic roles. This fosters collaboration and innovation, allowing teams to leverage AI while focusing on critical human tasks that drive competitive advantage.