The first ninety days

Suppose the argument has been won and someone has been given the job, whether under the new title or as a chief human resources officer with an enlarged mandate. What should they do first? Not what new executives usually do, which is announce a strategy. The first ninety days are for finding out, because almost no organisation knows what its artificial workforce is.

Days 1 to 30: the inventory

Every agent deployed anywhere in the organisation, in one register: what it does, in the language of the task rather than the product; which department introduced it; who owns it today; what decisions it is allowed to make on its own; and whether anyone has ever evaluated its output against the standard a person would be held to. In most organisations this exercise produces two findings. The artificial workforce is considerably larger than anyone assumed, because agents arrived through subscriptions nobody tracked. And several of them are acting on customers, applicants or suppliers with no named human accountable for what they do. That second finding alone justifies the role, and it should be reported to the chief executive as the first output of the ninety days.

Days 31 to 60: the accountability map

For every agent in the register, a named human role signs for its output, or the agent is paused. The person who signs must know the work well enough to recognise a wrong answer and must have the authority to stop the agent without convening a meeting. This is the stage of greatest resistance, because signing means owning the verification cost, and some leaders will discover they would rather the agent were paused than carry it. That preference is information: an agent nobody will sign for is an agent nobody should have deployed. Alongside the names, the boundaries are written down: what each agent may do alone, what with review, and what never.

Days 61 to 90: the composition plan

For the five task families with the most agent activity, a two-year statement of intent: what share of the work should be done by people, by agents and by the two together, and how fast that should change; the verification staffing the mix implies, as a budgeted line rather than an unbudgeted burden; the entry-level roles that will be preserved or redesigned as apprenticeships in verification; and the measures that will be reported quarterly beside headcount. This is the document that turns the role from an administrator of agents into the executive who decides, with the chief executive, what the organisation's work is done by.

Day 90: four questions for the board

How many agents does the organisation employ? What do they do? Who answers for each one? And what does the organisation still know how to do without them? At the end of ninety days the Chief Workforce Officer should be able to answer all four. Most organisations today cannot answer the first.

Notice what is absent from the ninety days: a vision statement, a transformation programme, a new platform. Those may come later, and some of them will be needed. But the organisation does not need a vision of its hybrid workforce before it has a list of it. The most useful thing a new CWO can do is the least glamorous: count, name, and write down. Everything else in this series depends on those three acts, and no one else in the organisation is going to perform them.