Middle East perspectives | Work in the AI era: The role of the people profession in an AI augmented workforce

Performance and value 

Q: How do you value human creativity when AI can replicate output?

AI is rapidly making production abundant. It can create compelling analysis, strategies, images, presentations and ideas at extraordinary speed. As production becomes cheaper, the scarce capability shifts. The premium is increasingly on judgment which is deciding what is worth pursuing. AI can generate a rationale, but it does not carry the lived consequence of being wrong. It does not own the impact of a decision on a colleague, customer, culture or society.

That is why human creativity remains so important. Creativity is not simply producing something original. It is connecting context, experience, curiosity and conviction to decide what should exist in the first place.

In an AI-native organisation, creativity therefore moves upstream towards asking better questions, framing better problems and determining what is worth building.

Global talent and competitive advantage

Q: What happens to global talent strategy when AI agents can be deployed across borders? 

AI changes one of the traditional constraints of talent strategy: access. Intelligent capability can increasingly be deployed across functions and geographies without relocation, visas or physical presence. That does not make exceptional human talent less valuable. It makes us more precise about where human talent creates differentiated value.

The premium will increasingly be on people who can work with intelligent systems, exercise judgment in ambiguity, lead human-AI teams, govern complexity and translate technology into real-world outcomes. These are not simply technical skills. They are leadership capabilities for a new era.

For Abu Dhabi, there is another dimension. The competition will not only be about attracting the world’s best people. It will increasingly be about creating the environment where the world’s best people and the world’s most capable intelligent systems can create value together. That requires infrastructure, governance, data sovereignty, talent and trust. Abu Dhabi has the opportunity to build that environment.

Q: How do nations compete when workforce capacity is no longer limited by population? 

Historically, population and workforce size were significant sources of national economic capacity. AI begins to change that equation. A country with the right infrastructure, talent, data, governance and AI-native operating models can create capability beyond what its population alone might suggest. This creates a particularly significant opportunity for the UAE and Abu Dhabi.

Abu Dhabi brings together sovereign AI infrastructure, investment capacity, global talent, strong governance and the ambition to build rather than simply consume technology.

At G42, enterprise transformation and national capability increasingly connect. The opportunity is not simply to deploy more AI. It is to help create a model for how human potential and responsible intelligence together can accelerate economic ambition. That could become an important competitive advantage for Abu Dhabi in the AI era.

Human leadership and culture 

Q: What is the role of leadership when AI can manage workflows but not meaning? 

AI will become increasingly capable at many things managers traditionally spend time doing such as analysing information, monitoring workflows, coordinating activity and recommending actions. That should allow leaders to spend less time managing activity. But what remains becomes even more important. Leaders create clarity. They exercise judgment. They build trust. They shape culture. They create belief. And they help people understand why their work matters.

AI can optimise a workflow. It cannot make someone believe in a mission. It can recommend a decision. It cannot carry responsibility for its human consequences. It can generate language about purpose. It cannot create meaning for another human being.

Perhaps one of the defining leadership questions of the AI era is therefore surprisingly simple: How do we use extraordinary technology to build organisations where people still feel that they matter? Because when people feel that they matter, performance, culture and transformation become stronger.

Q: How do you maintain culture when part of the workforce has no emotions but influences those who do?

AI agents may not experience culture, but they will absolutely influence it. They can affect workload, expectations, fairness, recognition, communication and the pace at which people are expected to operate. Technology can make employees feel empowered or constantly measured. Supported, or surveilled. Seen, or reduced to data.

So culture cannot be an afterthought in AI deployment.

At G42, our culture remains anchored in human ingenuity, curiosity, ownership, collaboration and value creation. AI should amplify those behaviours rather than unintentionally erode them. The important principle is that we should not design people around technology. We should design technology around the kind of human organisation we want to become.

The future of HR

Q: What becomes the People profession mandate when the workforce includes entities that do not age, fatigue or forget? 

The mandate becomes broader and, paradoxically, more human. Human Capital is no longer designing only for employees. Increasingly, we are helping architect an ecosystem of people, AI agents, platforms, data and intelligent workflows.

At G42, we see this as an evolution from process ownership towards workforce architecture. Human Capital needs to help determine what capability the organisation requires, where human judgment is essential, where AI creates leverage, how accountability is maintained, how people develop and how culture evolves around increasingly intelligent technology.

That does not mean Human Capital becomes a technology function. It means Human Capital must understand technology sufficiently well to shape its impact on people and organisations. Our ultimate mandate remains unchanged: enabling people to do meaningful, high-impact work and creating the conditions for human potential to grow.

Q: What new ethical frameworks must the people profession function create when intelligence becomes a resource rather than a role? 

There has to be one non-negotiable principle: Human accountability.

AI can inform decisions. It can recommend them and, within defined boundaries, execute them. But where decisions materially affect people, a human being must remain accountable. Around that principle we need transparency, fairness, responsible use of data, continuous oversight and the right for people to have significant AI-supported decisions reviewed by another human being.

The Human Capital profession has an important role here not because we own the technology, but because we understand its impact on experience, opportunity, trust and culture.

At G42, we are actively shaping, testing and learning what this model should become. We do not pretend that every answer is already known. But the direction is becoming clearer. The organisations that lead the AI era will not necessarily be those with the most AI or the fewest people. They will be those that design the strongest relationship between human ingenuity and machine intelligence.

That means combining AI’s speed and scale with the qualities that remain fundamentally human: judgment, accountability, creativity, culture and meaning. From Abu Dhabi, we have an opportunity not simply to adapt to that future, but to help shape it.