Whom to hire now, whom to let go

Essay #003 · 2026 · Reading time 7 min · Field: Personnel · Market: Mittelstand/Trades

One of the most uncomfortable conversations in an owner’s life: you tell a long-standing employee that their role is no longer needed. They did nothing wrong. The circumstances have shifted. You still have to say it.

Over the next three years, you will have this conversation more often. Not because agents destroy jobs, but because they take over individual tasks and thereby change what many roles are made of.

This essay shows which roles shrink, which grow, and which are new. And it explains why these decisions are yours to make, not your HR department’s.

Tasks disappear, not positions

First, what this essay does not say: that agents will replace thirty percent of positions in mid-sized companies. I see percentage figures like that in talks and articles all the time. I consider them misleading. Because what gets replaced is not positions but tasks. A position is made up of many tasks. If a third of them become automatable, the position does not disappear. It changes.

So the right question is not: how many positions will fall away? It is: which roles will still carry their weight in five years, and what does that mean for your next hire?

Three types of roles that shrink

The go-between for systems. People whose main job is moving information from one system to another: order-processing clerks, administrative assistants, parts of controlling. Digitalization already thinned these roles out over the last fifteen years. What remained was what the old systems could not do: complicated cases, exceptions, checks. Exactly that work is what agents now often handle too. In the companies I know, less of it remains than the people in those roles believe.

The text producer. Marketing copywriters, proposal writers, report authors. Their core business was turning bullet points into proper prose. Agents now write that prose themselves. What remains is the selection: Which text is actually needed? Which tone fits? Which position do we take? The writers I have worked with have long done this thinking work, but it was never the main part of the job. The main part was the writing. And that part is getting thinner.

The owner of a knowledge island. Employees whose value rests on knowledge nobody else in the company has: a complex set of rules, a procedure learned over years, an old customer relationship. This type is the most dangerous because it is the least visible. Agents make such knowledge widely available. What one person accumulated over years sits, after a few days of documentation work, in a system anyone can query. That lowers the value of exclusive knowledge. Not overnight, but clearly.

This third type is delicate. The people concerned often sit in key positions, have been loyal for years, and are reluctant to hand over their knowledge. That is understandable. For the company, it remains a risk when critical knowledge depends on a single person.

Two types of roles that gain importance

The judgment worker. People who make good decisions in unclear situations: senior engineers, experienced product managers, customer advisors in specialist segments. Agents work for them, but do not replace them. On the contrary: someone with good judgment can process far more material with agents. A senior with agent support delivers what used to take a small team. These roles become more valuable, not less.

The orchestrator. People who build, monitor, and correct agent systems. This is not a pure IT role. It combines process knowledge from the business side with a technical understanding of agents. My estimate: in companies of about fifty employees and up, three to five such roles will emerge over the next few years. They will be well paid and scarce in the market.

One role that is new

On top of these shifts comes a role that did not exist before: someone who leads the company’s use of agents strategically. Meaning: someone who decides where agents serve the business and where they do not. This is not a Chief AI Officer brought in from outside. Essay #001 describes why an external advisor who steps between you and your people tends to make the problem worse. This is the opposite: an internal role that connects business strategy and agent infrastructure.

In smaller companies, this job sits with the owner or managing director. In mid-sized ones, it emerges right next to them: at the strategic level, not in IT.

The title is secondary. What matters is that someone explicitly holds the job.

The question before every new hire

Before you fill a position today, ask one single question: Will this role still exist in five years? If “yes”: hire. If “I don’t know”: think twice. If “probably not”: don’t hire, and put the budget into one of the growing role types or into the new strategic role.

This is a guideline, not a law. Some roles you need today even though they will look different in five years. But the question forces you to make hiring decisions from strategy instead of habit.

What happens to the shrinking roles

And the employees who have been with you for years, who are good, who did nothing wrong? There is no comfortable answer.

Some of these roles can be rebuilt. The clerk now reviews the difficult cases; the copywriter selects and sets the editorial line. That costs training. And it requires that the person is willing and able to make the change.

Other roles cannot be rebuilt. Then your job is to shape the transition decently: talk early, compensate fairly, give references. Do not wait until the pressure is so high that you have to be harsh.

Postponed conversations do not get gentler, they get more painful. And the cost of waiting falls on the employees: with every month, they have fewer options for a move.

Why this is your job, not HR’s

An HR department cannot make these staffing decisions for you. They require that someone knows the strategic direction of the company, and that someone is you. For smaller businesses without their own HR, this is true anyway: there was never anyone to delegate the question to.

Without a clear direction, you only treat symptoms. A new hire here, a severance package there. In the end, you will have moved a lot of money and changed nothing structurally.

With a clear direction, you do the math once, properly. And you have the hard conversations with a clarity that serves the people concerned better than any evasion.

The first step costs one afternoon: take your list of positions and write one of three words behind every role — shrinks, grows, stays. Talk to the people behind “shrinks” first. The earlier you do, the more options everyone has.

— Axel Roth