Navigating the AI-enabled workforce shift: From managing exits to orchestrating ecosystems
As workforce disruption accelerates, organizations can unlock innovation and agility by building ramps to support worker transitions and keep skilled alumni close
Duleesha Kulasooriya
Nicole Scoble-Williams
Artie Gindidis
Miri Stephanie Takakura
Here’s a tale of two possible worlds for the future of work.
In one, the outlook feels unstable. Artificial intelligence transforms the nature of work, making many traditional roles obsolete or requiring significant reskilling. Workers are displaced from familiar positions and must navigate transitions, seeking new opportunities within their organizations or across the workforce ecosystem. Many find themselves piecing together fractional roles and gig work as interim solutions, often facing uncertainty about how to leverage their experience and skills in a rapidly changing market.
In the other, the future looks radically different. Workers choose missions instead of jobs. Fractional work and portfolio careers become engines of creativity. People move fluidly across roles, organizational boundaries, and entrepreneurial and artistic pursuits flourish. Individuals retain a strong sense of value and agency, confident they can adapt and contribute meaningfully, beyond traditional employment and talent models.
Both scenarios point to the same destination: a decentralized world of work. The difference between disruption and agency hinges on a critical organizational choice: how talent transitions are managed—in, out, and around, the organization—when roles change or disappear.
AI is not only reshaping work; it is democratizing expertise and lowering barriers to entry for innovation and entrepreneurship. AI agents can now act autonomously, working alongside humans. Organizations that embrace this shift—moving from headcount-based talent models to orchestrating a workforce ecosystem that includes employees, alumni and ecosystem talent—will likely be positioned to thrive, leveraging hybrid human-agentic workforces for competitive advantage.1 As a result, relationships, rather than headcount, become the engine for growth, with alliance-based projects and relationship-centered business development becoming core drivers of value.
Workforce transitions should also be managed with sensitivity to global labor frameworks. For example, in Germany, Works Councils require significant codetermination,2 while in the broader European Union, new AI regulations demand transparency and accountability. Leading organizations will likely be the ones developing innovative strategies that are also grounded in local compliance, worker protections, and social trust.
Traditional layoffs often feel like a cliff—an abrupt end that severs ties and erodes trust. But what if organizations’ biggest talent strategy failure is assuming their workforces end at their payrolls?
Talent ramps can create new strategic opportunities
Talent ramps offer a different path. They create structured transitions that help workers pivot, with support, into meaningful new roles either within or outside of the organization, and enable organizations to maintain enduring relationships with alumni and ecosystem talent—as entrepreneurs, advisors, vendors, or community builders. Done well, ramps ease workers out of roles that no longer fit while equipping them with the skills, networks, and confidence to thrive in the working world of tomorrow. This design transforms disruption into competitive advantage, strengthens organizational agility, and fosters the trust which is important for sustaining human-AI collaboration at scale.
Ramps are not just about exits. They unlock new capability and capacity at speed and scale, driving competitive advantage in a rapidly evolving market and enabling new models of work redesign with humans and machines working together.
Equally important is the social impact of facilitating transitions into the new world of work. By building more enduring relationships among themselves, employees, and alumni and ecosystem talent, organizations can embed themselves in social infrastructure, reinvigorating their social license to operate.
But in an era of accelerating AI adoption and the associated workforce disruption, many organizations may also need to earn a social license to automate. When workers feel discarded, they may be less likely to share institutional knowledge, weakening the very systems automation aims to build. Designing ramps into the workforce ecosystem builds goodwill, grounding transitions in fairness and encouraging participation in continuous work redesign rather than withdrawal.
Deloitte calls this emerging ecosystem of future-ready, skilled talent in the AI era the “NOMAD economy.” While “digital nomad” is often used to refer to remote workers, our definition is broader, reflecting a fluid workforce moving across roles, industries, and identities—including employees, alumni, and ecosystem talent.
In our view, NOMAD serves as a unifying label for five archetypes of human work—each characterized by a worker’s primary contribution:3
- Nurturers, who imagine and care, shaping purpose, inspiration, and community
- Operators, who steward automation to execute critical functions
- Makers, who craft to bring ideas into reality
- Adventurers, who explore new markets and ventures
- Directors, who navigate systems and values
These archetypes are not limited to traditional employment—they apply across the entire workforce ecosystem, supporting talent inside, outside, and around the organization.
Which NOMAD are you?
Each NOMAD pathway depends on a different form of agency: personal agency to act, social agency for mobilization, and growth agency to explore new areas. Which NOMAD are you, and where are the opportunities for each archetype?
Nurturer
Education, culture, and care are expanding as societies age and digital life accelerates. People with skills in teaching, storytelling, and caregiving will play a central role in keeping communities connected and resilient.
Signals
- UNESCO estimates the world will need 40 million new teachers by 2030.4
- A shortfall of 11 million global health workers by 2030 is estimated, underscoring the need for hybrid tech-enabled care roles and community services.5
- Deloitte research estimates that there are 50 million digital creators globally, contributing to a social commerce market which is forecast to be worth US$2 trillion by 2026.6
How to get ahead
Opportunities
- AI literacy coaches for subject matter experts and schools; immersive cultural storytellers for heritage tourism; elder care tech companions integrating AI tools with human support
Skills
- AI literacy, cultural curation, digital storytelling, hybrid health care, community organizing
Learning pathways
- Teacher AI competency frameworks, online content creation academies, caregiver certification courses, grassroots leadership workshops
Operator
As autonomous technologies spread, organizations still need humans to keep them safe, fair, and reliable. Testing, auditing, and hands-on oversight of digital and physical tech will be vital in roles that put people firmly in the loop.
Signals
- The European Union’s AI Act established a tiered oversight regulatory regime, whereby high-risk AI systems must undergo risk management, human oversight, documentation, monitoring, and evaluation.7
- Morgan Stanley research estimates that humanoid robots are likely to become a US$5 trillion market by 2050.8
- In a café in Japan, people with disabilities serve customers through remotely operated robotics, providing them with an income and advancing social inclusion.9
How to get ahead
Opportunities
- AI compliance auditors for startups; model risk testers; robotics or drone field technicians; bias auditors; smart-grid and Internet of Things custodians; incident response retainers
Skills
- AI auditing, red-teaming, robotics and drone maintenance, data ethics, and incident response
Learning pathways
- Certifications in AI risk management (e.g., National Institute of Standards and Technology-aligned programs), drone operator training, cybersecurity bootcamps, and applied AI ethics courses
Maker
Improved tools like 3D printers, alt-protein labs, and AI-native game engines will make it easier than ever to turn ideas into real products. Opportunities are opening for those with creative, technical, digital, and craft skills to build what’s next.
Signals
- 3D-printed construction is moving from pilots to procurement; the World Economic Forum highlights 20% to 30% cost and time reductions and new models for affordable housing.10
- The World Economic Forum’ Future of Jobs report 2025” estimates that UI and UX designers will be the eighth fastest-growing job role by 2030.11
- 3.4 billion people played video games in 2024, with the gaming market expected to grow over 8% per year between 2024 and 2027 to reach US$363 billion.12 Game developers will be critical to fulfill this growing demand.
How to get ahead
Opportunities
- 3D-printed housing contractors; synthetic food micro-producers; immersive and augmented reality micro-studios, education and safety training for small-scale producers
Skills
- AI-assisted 3D design and fabrication, bio lab prototyping, immersive content creation, and product branding and customization
Learning pathways
- Access to studios and fabrication labs, online 3D modelling and printing platforms, and immersive design workshops
Adventurer
Entrepreneurs and specialists with curiosity and agility may find space to experiment, test, and scale ideas faster than ever. Breakthroughs in AI, biotech, energy, and space need risk takers who can explore uncharted ground.
Signals
- In 2024, 40% of the money raised by US startups was raised by AI-fueled startups.13
- AI unicorns took an average of only two years from establishment to reach unicorn status, doing so with less than half the employees needed by non-AI unicorns.14
- The World Economic Forum projects 170 million new jobs by 2030 from digital and sustainability transitions, much of it through entrepreneurship.15
How to get ahead
Opportunities
- AI-native entrepreneurs; space venture capitalists; renewable energy microfinance entrepreneurs
Skills
- Entrepreneurial strategy, “vibe coding,” applied AI, sustainability tech literacy, quantum computing understanding, and pitch deck creation
Learning pathways
- Participation in accelerators, sustainability innovation fellowships, quantum coding sandboxes, and venture-building bootcamps
Director
Navigating values, regulation, and risk is getting more complex, requiring human direction, judgment and arbitration. Organizations will likely need advocates to push for supportive policies, fueling the growth of advocacy industries.
Signals
- The EU’s Cyber Resilience Act sets base cybersecurity requirements for a wide range of digital products, obliging manufacturers, importers, and distributors to implement secure-by-design processes and vulnerability management.16
- Australia has proposed subjecting digital asset exchanges to the same licensing and conduct requirements as financial intermediaries.17
How to get ahead
Opportunities
- AI ethics and compliance advisors for midsize firms; fractional policy fellows and lobbyists for industry consortia; carbon-credit brokers for local SMEs; cross-cultural mediators for expansion markets
Skills
- Industry-specific regulatory knowledge, understanding of regulatory technology tools and risk management
Learning pathways
- Fellowships in governance, subject matter expert compliance advisory and industry associations
Understanding these archetypes is not just an exercise in classification—it’s an invitation for leaders and individuals alike to see themselves in the transition, and for organizations to design ramps that support each journey. The examples that follow show what ramp building looks like in practice across the five archetypes of the NOMAD economy and how organizations stand to gain by staying connected.
AI is driving new urgency for strategic talent transitions
The shift toward these two futures is already underway, and for millions of workers, the ground is moving fast. AI is rewriting the rules of work; the very technology that is supercharging productivity is also accelerating change: transforming roles, creating new opportunities, and in some cases, fueling concerns about job displacement or skills becoming obsolete.18 Many workers worry about being cut off—financially and professionally—as the nature of work evolves and the expectations for talent shift.
The numbers tell the story. Global tech firms eliminated 239,000 roles in 2024 and 209,000 in 2025,19 triggering ripple effects across offices and supply chains globally. A layoff in San Francisco can reverberate through a regional hub in Singapore or a back-end function in Surat, India. Initially concentrated in tech, this pattern is spreading across industries—from telecommunications to finance—with automation-related attrition likely underestimated.20 Labor markets in transition mean many will not simply “find another job,” especially early-career talent21 and displaced tech workers.22
Paradoxically, there has never been a better time to create something new. AI and emerging technologies are lowering the barriers to entrepreneurship, innovation, and reinvention. Individuals and organizations alike have unprecedented tools to design, prototype, and launch ideas that once required entire teams and infrastructure.23 The future of work is not just about loss, but about the chance to build what comes next.
Against this backdrop, talent ramps become an important strategic lever for organizations seeking to move from disruption to advantage. They can provide clarity and confidence with practical, structured pathways that help workers transition with dignity and help organizations preserve relationships, knowledge, and trust while supporting both business resilience and individual agency. The alternative, “cliff” layoffs, carries risks beyond the immediate human cost. Research shows job cuts erode morale among remaining employees, reduce productivity, and increase voluntary turnover.24
Investor reactions are mixed: well-signaled restructuring can lift stock prices briefly, but repeated or poorly framed cuts often lead to long-term underperformance.25 Employer brand suffers too, making it harder to access and develop the capability and capacity needed at the speed and scale required in strategically important functions where talent is becoming more important, not less.
Organizations that invest in talent ramps can mitigate these risks and extend their influence into emerging ecosystems, turning disruption into a platform for resilience and innovation.
Building ramps in the NOMAD economy
Layoffs sever ties. Ramps multiply them.
As organizations navigate the AI workforce shift, the challenge is not only to manage role changes and exits, but to create pathways that sustain relationships, unlock new value, and extend influence. The NOMAD economy reflects a workforce that moves fluidly across roles, industries, and identities.
For all five archetypes—Nurturers, Operators, Makers, Adventurers, and Directors—ramps are not just about exits. They can unlock new capability and capacity at speed and scale, driving competitive advantage in a rapidly evolving market.
Nurturers
In an AI-driven economy, investing in human potential—care, education, and culture—becomes a strategic differentiator. Nurturers guide others, foster belonging, and bring purpose to organizations and communities.
Strategic ramp:
Organizations can channel Nurturers into social impact initiatives and education partnerships, reinforcing brand trust and extending reach beyond the organization.
Case in point:
IBM’s Transition to Teaching program retrained employees as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics educators with tuition support and flexible part-time work arrangements.26 This ramp met a critical social need while strengthening IBM’s credibility and community connection.
Operators
As AI and automation reshape core operations, human judgment remains essential for reliability and safety. Operators steward machines and systems, ensuring critical functions run smoothly.
Strategic ramp:
Organizations can build talent marketplaces—including former employees, retirees, or external specialists —or preferred vendor pools for Operators, enabling ready access to talent and capabilities at speed for specialized projects or surge capacity.
Case in point:
BMW’s Senior Experts Program invited retired engineers back for part-time, project-based roles.27 These experts addressed technical challenges and mentored younger colleagues, preventing brain drain and ensuring vital knowledge transfer as the company navigated generational shifts.28
Makers
The democratization of tools and rising demand for customization are empowering Makers—individuals who turn ideas into tangible products through craft, skill, and ingenuity.
Strategic ramp:
Organizations can offer Makers access to fabrication labs, short-term design sprints, and creative software licenses, fostering innovation and giving the organization rights to license or scale promising prototypes—regardless of whether Makers are current staff, alumni, or external collaborators.
Case in point:
Airbus supports Makers through its ProtoSpace workshops, which focus on rapid physical prototyping.29 Successful projects are incubated through the innovation platform, keeping innovation close to the core business.30 While ProtoSpace is designed for current Airbus employees, offering alumni and workers beyond the organization’s boundaries broader access to tools and spaces like this could turn it into a ramp that unlocks additional capability and capacity to continue developing ideas.
Adventurers
AI is accelerating entrepreneurial innovation, empowering Adventurers to explore new markets and experiment with new business models.
Strategic ramp:
Organizations can establish venture funds or fellowship programs to stay connected to Adventurers—whether they are alumni, current employees or ecosystem entrepreneurs—as they launch new ventures.
Case in point:
HR software startup Lattice invests US$100,000 into startups founded by qualified alumni. By taking equity, Lattice transforms departures into long-term strategic upside, cultivating a pipeline of future partners, customers, and collaborators.31
Directors
As regulation and governance grow more complex, Directors interpret systems, arbitrate values, and extend influence beyond the organization.
Strategic ramp:
Organizations can support transitions into governance, policy, and advisory roles, drawing from networks of current and former employees as well as external advisors, strengthening reputation and reach.
Case in point:
Goldman Sachs institutionalized alumni engagement through a network of 115,000 former employees, providing access to job marketplaces, strategic events, and ongoing support as alumni transitioned into senior governance and public service roles.32
These five archetypes are not strict categories. They represent the diverse human capabilities likely to drive value creation in an AI-driven economy. For individuals, the NOMAD archetypes can help identify new work and career pathway possibilities beyond traditional employment models, through fractional formats that enable them to contribute across multiple areas. For organizations, they provide a lens for investing across a broader talent ecosystem to unlock access to capability and capacity at speed and scale and drive competitive advantage for the new realities of today’s world of work.
With the archetypes in mind, the next step is to consider how organizations can put these ideas into practice.
Five principles for designing ramps
Turning the vision of ramps into practice requires boards and C-suites to champion a new talent playbook. Smart organizations treat work redesign with the same urgency as onboarding, designing ramps to make intentional investments in talent success.
The following five principles can provide a disciplined framework for creating ramps that deliver measurable value.
1. Invest in mindsets
The rise of the AI-driven economy has created a powerful tension: workers feel concern even as opportunities grow. One survey revealed that only 28% of surveyed workers operate with a “pilot” mindset—optimistic, proactive, and ready to leverage AI—while 72% feel more like “passengers,” unable to exert control in the face of disruption.33
Without mindset support and intentional human-machine work design, even the best-designed ramps may remain underutilized. Coaching, mentoring, and leadership development can shift this trajectory, helping workers build optimism and agency and adapt with resilience.34
The Designing Your Life Institute offers one such coaching model, leveraging design thinking to help workers take agency over their careers.35 In Singapore, the government’s workforce body partners with the Designing Your Life Institute to offer courses free for early-career workers, and at subsidised rates for mid- and late-career workers.36 This combination of structured support and national policy creates a culture where reskilling and reinvention are celebrated, not stigmatized.
2. Repurpose the budget
Ramps need not increase costs. Organizations can redirect a portion of restructuring budgets into ramp mechanisms, such as alumni and ecosystem talent platforms or microgrants.
Nokia’s Bridge Program, launched during its 2011 to 2014 restructuring, offered 18,000 employees four pathways: reemployment into other open roles, job search support, retraining support, or funding for startup ideas.37 At €50 million38—compared to total restructuring costs of €1.7 billion39—the program mitigated many downsizing risks. Employee engagement scores remained stable throughout layoffs, suggesting that the program also helped to sustain psychological safety and morale among remaining employees.40 Such models can be extended to the workforce ecosystem, including alumni and ecosystem talent, multiplying organizational reach and resilience.
3. Institutionalize governance
Ramps work well when they are managed with discipline, empathy, and compliance. Organizations need clear rules on intellectual property, conflicts of interest, and non-compete boundaries to mitigate potential legal challenges. They also need lightweight contracting mechanisms that make it easy for an extended workforce—including alumni and ecosystem talent—to engage in fractional and project work. Governance should also ensure compliance with local labor laws and AI regulations, such as codetermination in Germany, worker consultation in the EU, and other jurisdictional requirements.
Cross-functional governance enables ramps to scale without friction and positions workforce ecosystem engagement as a trusted, repeatable process.
4. Measure what matters
To prove value, organizations should track real outcomes, not just sentiment, across human, machine, and ecosystem performance. These value creation outcomes could include:
- Reputation lift: Brand favorability, societal impact metrics, workforce and alumni satisfaction
- Revenue contribution: Sales and pipeline attributable to engaging workers and alumni as vendors, advisors, or partners
- Innovation yield: Startups funded, worker AI adoption, IP licensed, prototypes commissioned
- Participation: Worker engagement with talent ramp programs and opportunities
Organizations can use these measures to demonstrate the tangible impact of talent ramps, inform continuous improvement, and communicate value to stakeholders across the workforce ecosystem.
5. Advocate for worker policy support
Ramps need robust social infrastructure to support talent moving in and out of traditional roles. Forward-thinking organizations should advocate for and actively shape and influence policy to reflect the shift from managing employees to orchestrating talent ecosystems.
While government action is important to establish stronger and lasting safety nets for fractional workers, organizations can take the lead by partnering with private social infrastructure providers to support talent—including alumni and ecosystem talent—through transitions. Online platforms for portable benefits can provide workers with long-term coverage—including healthcare and unemployment insurance— enabling them to move seamlessly between roles and employers.41
From disruption to advantage
The AI-driven workforce transition is not a passing trend—it is a structural shift that will likely redefine competitive advantage. Organizations risk more than short-term turbulence when they view disruption solely as a series of layoffs; they risk eroding trust, losing institutional knowledge, and weakening their capacity to innovate.
Organizations have an opportunity to establish stronger, more enduring relationships with workers, both inside and outside the organization, by shifting from a headcount-based approach to a more relationship-centric model focused on intentional orchestration of workforce ecosystems. Employment is no longer a static promise, but an entry point into a network of capability and capacity that creates opportunities long after roles evolve. By redesigning work and reimagining talent transitions as strategic investments, organizations can turn AI disruption into competitive advantage, reallocating employees into new roles while engaging alumni and ecosystem talent as clients, collaborators, and ambassadors.
In an AI-driven economy where organizations are leaner, and the ability to access capability and capacity at speed and scale is more important than ever, talent ramps are more than a luxury. They can be a lever for resilience, reputation, and relevance. Those who act now may not only navigate disruption—they will likely shape the future of work.
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Meet the industry leaders
Nicole Scoble-Williams
Duleesha Kulasooriya
Artie Gindidis
Miri Stephanie Takakura
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Duleesha Kulasooriya
Nicole Scoble-Williams
Artie Gindidis
Miri Stephanie Takakura
The authors would like to thank Michael Sagna for his efforts on research and analysis, which contributed significantly to this article’s development. They also thank Abha Kishore Kulkarni for providing support with statistics throughout the piece.
The authors also extend their heartfelt thanks to the following, whose feedback has made the creation of this report possible: Anton Pichler, Clare Harding, Corrie Commisso, Indranil Roy, Iskandar Ruhaizat, James Walton, Jeanette Juay, Jennifer Wright, Kurt Proctor-Parker, Maria Kudrina, Mark Maclean, Mark Teo, Matthew Cheuk, Michelle Khoo, Mike Canning, Nozomi Sakurai, Robert Hillard, Sayanika Bordoloi, and Sonia Breeze.
Editorial (including production and copyediting): Corrie Commisso, Annalyn Kurtz, Sayanika Bordoloi, and Anu Augustine
Design: Sanaa Saifi and Sylvia Chang
Knowledge services: Rohan Singh
Audience development: Pooja Boopathy
Cover image by: Sanaa Saifi