When Every Job Becomes an IT Job

This week, my school superintendent sent out her weekly reflection. It didn’t start with test scores, attendance rates, or curriculum updates. It opened with IT uptime stats: network availability, service ticket resolution, cybersecurity monitoring.

Think about that. The leader of one of the largest school systems in the U.S. is now reporting like a CIO. Families expect it. Teachers depend on it. The trust we place in the district isn’t just about teaching and safety — it’s about whether the digital backbone of the system holds.

This is the quiet reality of work today: every job is becoming, in part, an IT job.

My former ThoughtWorks colleague, Marie Claire Dean calls this shift hybrid roles: positions that fuse human judgment with system-level responsibilities. I’ve written about the bionic workplace, where AI and digital systems are not just tools but colleagues to be managed, coached, and integrated into culture.

The superintendent’s letter makes it tangible. Leadership roles outside the tech sector — education, healthcare, government — are already hybrid. They require fluency in two languages: the human one of trust, vision, and culture, and the technical one of uptime, data, and digital reliability.

And this cultural shift runs deep. Hybrid roles aren’t just about skills. They redefine what communities expect from leaders. We no longer separate the classroom from the network, or the city hall from its digital service portals. Technical reliability is cultural infrastructure.

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AI as Colleague, Not Just Tool

Dean describes hybrid roles as “agent-inclusive design” — treating AI as an active participant, not just background software. I extend that into what I call the Integration Spectrum: tool → assistant → colleague.

That last step, colleague, is what makes hybrid roles truly different. Once you see AI as a colleague, the question changes: how do you manage it?

The pattern is consistent across sectors:

• In education, superintendents now report on uptime and cybersecurity alongside instruction.
• In business, software engineers are shifting from writing code to orchestrating and validating AI-generated code.
• In healthcare, radiologists and oncologists work with AI systems to flag anomalies at machine speed, while retaining human oversight for interpretation, empathy, and care decisions.

Each example points to the same reality: leaders accountable for human outcomes must also manage digital colleagues.

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The Great Inversion: Humans Curate, Machines Create

Dean also notes that as AI takes over execution, human roles tilt toward guidance, curation, and taste. I call this the Great Inversion.

Machines create faster than ever. Humans decide what matters.

Design schools are already adapting. At Cornell and the Interaction Design Foundation, curricula are shifting from technical execution to originality, storytelling, and discernment.

And when one team let AI run marketing end-to-end, it failed. Why? Because vibe, narrative, and meaning remain human territory.

For business leaders, this means your competitive edge lies not in producing more but in choosing better. If you’re managing a team, the question becomes: how do we ensure our people are curators of context and not just passengers on the output conveyor belt?

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Building the Culture of Hybrid Work

Hybrid roles don’t just emerge — they need scaffolding. I see two big layers of culture that support them:

Organizational Infrastructure

• The Digestion Gap: Humans need protected reflection windows so machine output becomes human understanding.
• Cultural Transformation: Trust and transparency are non-negotiable when humans and AI share workflows.

Workforce Evolution

• The Social Contract Reboot: As Stanford HAI research shows, workers want augmentation, not replacement. Organizations must shift to outcome-based work agreements, renewable “tours of duty,” and budgets for constant up-skilling.
• Perpetual Beta: Platforms like DataCamp and Coursera remind us that professional identity itself is now continuous learning.
• Midlife Contributions: Experienced leaders bring systems perspective, institutional memory, and mentorship that younger colleagues (and AI systems) can’t replicate.

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Living in the House We’re Building

Dean has drawn the blueprint for hybrid roles. My focus has been on showing how we might actually live in them: how to design roles, lead teams, and build cultures where humans and AI don’t just coexist but co-create.

Which brings me back to the superintendent. Her email wasn’t just a quirky reminder that schools run on IT. It was a signal of the world we’re all stepping into: teachers, doctors, executives, and city managers alike are becoming hybrid leaders, accountable for both human outcomes and digital reliability.

Hybrid roles aren’t the future of work. They’re the present, arriving faster than most realize.

So where do you start? Audit one role in your organization:

• What digital systems does this person rely on?
• What happens when those systems fail?
• How much of their credibility depends on technical reliability?

That’s your blueprint for designing hybrid success.

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Dig Deeper

• Marie Claire Dean: The Future of Work: 7 Hybrid Roles
• Adam Monago: The Bionic Workplace: Beyond Automation to True Human–AI Partnership
• Adam Monago: The Prompt Wars Are Over. Context Engineers Won.
• Adam Monago: The Digestion Gap: How We Process Information in the Age of AI

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Thanks for reading.

Madam I’m Adam