Five Steps for Redesigning Work in the Age of AI

When Publicis Sapient’s chief marketing and communications officer sought to drive growth without increasing expenses or headcount, she turned to the natural solution for a company whose products promise to unlock AI-driven enhancements and efficiencies: more AI.

Teresa Barreira believed in the vision Publicis Sapient promoted to its clients. It was a bet on her own company’s pitch that AI is a resource equalizer — a catalyst that could help challenger brands compete with anyone.

An initial plan offered employees leeway to incorporate AI into their workflows, with a simple mandate for marketing employees to use AI tools in their jobs, and report back after six months.

The results, if not exactly failure, were far from a resounding success.

The new tools brought supercharged capabilities, but results remained largely unchanged because the team had not redesigned how it worked. Achieving organizational transformation seemed elusive.

The experience, as the firm's head of marketing innovation incubator recalled, was “like a farmer plugging electricity into their horse.”

The struggle, recounted in the new Darden Business Publishing technical note “Redesigning Work in the Age of AI: Publicis Sapient's Five-Step Marketing Transformation,” is one of the endemic management challenges of the moment, according to Kimberly A. Whitler, the Frank M. Sands Sr. Associate Professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business.

“Everyone knows how important AI is right now, and marketers and companies everywhere are taking different approaches,” said Whitler. “Right now, most organizations are struggling to maximize transformation. This is normal as early iterations are centered on experimentation.”

While Publicis Sapient could have thrown in the towel or simply checked the box on use of the new tools, Barreira and her team were determined to figure out how to make them work for the benefit of the organization. They committed to devising a process to figure out how to ideally work and grow in an era of transformative technology.

“Their early experimentation was crucial. It not only led them to an approach that ultimately drove transformation, but the invitation to experiment actually prepared the organization to embrace AI,” said Whitler. “Because they worked through the initial struggle, they are ahead of many of their peers, and I think there are some real aha moments in their approach.”

Changing the Nature of the Work Itself

When organizations decide to bring AI capabilities into an organization, it's critical they have goals in mind. Is AI simply a worker productivity boost? Is it being brought in with the goal of replacing human labor?

In the case of Publicis Sapient, Barreira's goal for AI was clear: The new capabilities should fundamentally change the nature of work so that employees could “spend their time on the most critical activities that would yield the greatest impact.”

Using the tools to complete existing work faster did nothing to further the goals of transformation and impact. And yet, the initial six-month exploratory period was not time wasted. After half a year of experimenting, AI had been infused in the company's culture, and employees were comfortable with the tools.

“They initially saw it as a failure, but I see it as a critical first step,” Whitler said. “They demystified AI and got participation from the bottom up, and the people at the top better understood the work being done across the organization.”

Embracing the issue with a mindset of continuous improvement, the Publicis Sapient leadership team continued to iterate on its approach and eventually devised a five-step framework for redesigning marketing work in the age of AI.

1. Experimenting with AI tools and agents. Given an invitation to explore, teams grew comfortable with the new tools, laying critical groundwork for future steps.

2. Mapping tasks across the Marketing and Communications function. Aiding visibility across the marketing group, tasks were mapped across every unit, allowing all stakeholders to better understand the nature of their team's work. Tasks were further segmented into those that could be done by AI alone, those in which AI could aid humans and those best suited to humans alone.

3, Turning marketers into builders. With AI agents easier to build than ever, Publicis Sapient leaders made marketers the architects of the tools they wanted and would actually use.

4. Redesigning workflows end to end. While assistants brought certain efficiencies, the real gains came from redesigning workflows with AI in mind. In one example Whitler cites, a marketing campaign that historically would have had 50 distinct touchpoints or approvals before completion required only nine, and the development timeline was cut from 20 days to as few as three.

5. Refining roles and job descriptions. Planning to make the transformation sustainable, marketers were instructed to write a new job description for their new roles and spell out how they planned to reinvest their time now that so much of it had been freed up by automation.

Critically, leadership made clear that while AI-powered transformation was now an expected part of a high-performance culture, it was also a culture they were all forging together. One day of the month, called Pause For Learning Day, was devoted to nothing more than continuous education; employee-led AI Thursdays occurred twice a month; and on Failure Fridays teams shared what went wrong, with the individual who had failed fastest and learned the most receiving an award.

The proof of the approach showed up in key performance indicators, with significant measurable improvement in operational and growth metrics.

The Shortsightedness of Prioritizing Efficiency

Although devised in a marketing group, the approach has potential implications for any organization struggling to incorporate new technologies at a time of rapid change, said Whitler. The transformation is almost certainly not going to be an easy process but doing nothing in the face of such new capabilities is likely to yield less productivity and an increasingly nervous workforce.

“There's so much wisdom in their approach, because there's so much research showing that people are terrified of AI taking their jobs,” said Whitler. “The best way to protect against that is to bring people together and figure it out.”

While AI-related job losses can be seen in news headlines every week, and many major companies have been explicit in their statements tying layoffs to AI efficiencies, such moves may prove to be shortsighted at this stage of AI adoption, says Whitler.

“Is AI going to amplify output and accelerate growth, or is it going to simply drive efficiency and eliminate cost?” Whitler said. “Figuring out how to drive significant transformation that drives  extraordinary new performance outcomes is generally the business amplifier.”

Professor Kimberly A. Whitler is the author of the technical note, “Redesigning Work in the Age of AI: Publicis Sapient’s Five-Step Marketing Transformation,” published by Darden Business Publishing (April 2026).