How AI Is Changing Job Roles and What Employers Should Watch For

I hired an intern recently, partly to help her complete the required experience hours to sit for the Certified Public Accountant exam, and partly because it made sense for where my company was at the time.

I don't typically bring on someone without experience, but having had to struggle through this experience myself, giving back mattered to me.

Because of how my company operates, her role shifted quickly toward automation work. Within a few months, she was doing far more automation work than she was expecting. At one point, she expressed to me that the level of automation we were asking of her wasn't really her thing. She enjoyed accounting, not building workflows.

That conversation is what surfaced the problem. If she hadn't brought it up, one of two things would have happened. Either she would have become unhappy and eventually left, or I would have gotten frustrated with her results without understanding why they had changed.

We adjusted her role so she's more focused on the numbers side now, helping with the calculations behind the automation instead of building the workflows themselves. AI is what drove that drift, and it happened in only months.

The real cost of ignoring this is usually losing the person. And the actual problem is usually that the job changed, and the job description never caught up.

Catching it requires staying forward thinking about two things: where AI is needed for a role that already exists, and where AI is making a role uncomfortable or different from what the person originally signed up for.

Regular check-ins can catch mismatches before they become bigger issues.

I check for this every so often. I ask my employees what their favorite and least favorite parts of their role are. Based on their answers, I evaluate whether certain tasks should shift to another person, get automated, or possibly be handed to a new hire.

It's a small habit, but it's what I've found helps catch any mismatches before they turn into an issue.

At AI Accounting Agency, this is part of how we think about AI in practice. The goal is not just to use new tools. The goal is to notice when the work has changed, make the role clear again, and keep good people in the right seats.