A new whitepaper from the Adecco Group, released today, reframes the entire AI-and-work conversation in a way that most business leaders probably need to hear.

The threat is not that AI will eliminate jobs. The threat is that most organizations will be too slow to change how work is structured, and their competitors will run circles around them while they are still debating whether to adopt anything at all.

Adecco’s report, “On the threshold: AI, the future of work and the rise of hybrid labor markets,” was developed in partnership with research firm Altermind. It lands at a moment when the noise around AI and jobs is at peak volume, and it cuts through most of it.

What the Numbers Actually Say

Between 2022 and 2025, AI-related roles accounted for 1.9 million new jobs globally. That is not a rounding error. It is a signal that the AI economy creates work even as it transforms existing roles.

The more confronting number sits on the enterprise side: only 18% of US firms and 20% of European firms have integrated AI into core workflows at any meaningful scale. That means roughly four out of every five businesses have either experimented superficially or done almost nothing.

For the companies in that 80%, the risk is not that AI will take their people. It is that their competitors, who have figured out how to deploy AI properly, will outproduce, outprice, and out-serve them while they are still running pilot programs.

A New Management Discipline

Adecco introduces the concept of “hybrid workforce orchestration” — and while the phrase sounds like something a consultant dreamed up, the idea behind it is genuinely practical.

Hybrid workforce orchestration is the discipline of redesigning work so that people, AI agents, software automation, and physical AI (robotics, sensors, autonomous systems) each contribute to creating the most value. The operative word is redesigning. Not layering AI on top of existing workflows. Not giving everyone a chatbot. Rethinking what each part of your workforce — human and machine — should actually be doing.

This matters because most organizations approach AI adoption as a tooling problem. They buy software, they train some staff, and then they wonder why productivity gains are marginal. The problem is that the work itself has not changed. The same tasks are being done in roughly the same way, just with an AI assistant present.

Hybrid workforce orchestration asks a harder question: if an AI agent can handle that task autonomously, what should your people be doing instead?

AI Is Changing Tasks, Not Eliminating People

The Adecco report is careful to avoid both the techno-utopian framing (AI will free everyone for creative work) and the doom framing (AI will hollow out employment). Instead, it argues that AI is changing tasks faster than it is eliminating jobs, and that the adjustment is uneven across sectors and organizational readiness.

That unevenness is where the strategic opportunity lives. Industries and companies that have figured out how to redesign work — not just automate isolated steps — are pulling ahead. Those that have not are falling behind in ways that will be difficult to recover from once the gap becomes visible in revenue and margin data.

The whitepaper positions corporate inertia as the primary economic risk. Not regulation. Not model capability. Not the pace of the technology itself. The organizations that move slowly on integrating AI into real workflows are the ones in danger.

What This Means for Business

If your business is in the 80% that has not yet integrated AI into core workflows at scale, this report is not a reason to panic. It is a reason to move with more urgency than you currently are.

A few things follow directly from the Adecco framework:

Start with work design, not tool selection. The question “which AI tool should we buy?” is less important than “what work do we want AI to own?” Identify the workflows where AI can operate autonomously, and redesign those workflows before you add the technology. Tooling a broken process produces a faster broken process.

Build for orchestration, not replacement. The goal is not to remove humans from operations. It is to give your people work that requires their judgment, relationships, and domain expertise — while agents handle the volume, the routine, and the data-intensive. That requires deliberate design.

Treat AI integration as a leadership priority, not an IT project. The 18% of firms that have integrated AI into core workflows did not get there by buying software licenses and hoping for the best. They had executive sponsorship, clear use-case prioritization, and training investment alongside the technology.

The 82% that have not are not waiting for better AI. They are waiting for leadership clarity and organizational will.

The Orchestration Gap

There is a version of the next three years where most businesses look back and realize they had access to the same tools as their most capable competitors. The difference will not have been the technology. It will have been who redesigned their operations around it and who did not.

Hybrid workforce orchestration is not a buzzword. It is a management challenge that every business with more than a handful of employees needs to take seriously in 2026. The technology is ready. The organizational question is whether the businesses are.

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If your business is working through what AI integration at scale actually looks like for your specific operations, an Omni Advisory conversation is a practical starting point. For teams that need to build the foundational data and AI skills to participate in this transition, Enterprise DNA’s business learning plans offer structured programs from Power BI and Python through to applied AI for operational teams.