AIS609: The Delegation Shift: Designing Work for Human + AI Collaboration

Most organizations spent 2025 teaching people to prompt better. That was the right move for the moment. It’s also no longer the point.The harder question for 2026 is structural: when AI stops being a tool you pick up and starts being a collaborator you delegate to, the design of the work itself has to change. Delegation requires deciding what to hand off, how much oversight to keep, where judgment still has to live, and who’s accountable when a human and a system share the work. Those are operating model questions and most organizations aren’t set up to answer them yet.This session gives you three frameworks for designing that shift instead of stumbling into it. We’ll start with the AI Capability Staircase, a way to locate where your people and your workflows actually are right now. From there we’ll move to the Five Work Archetypes, which describes how roles reshape once AI is a real collaborator. And we’ll close on the structural question most organizations get wrong: when to deploy AI as a solo pilot, a pair, or a pod, and why that choice determines whether delegation actually works.Drawing on his work in Human + AI talent strategy and workforce transformation at Accenture, David will connect these frameworks to the support systems, capability paths, and leadership decisions that move an organization past experimentation toward something durable. You’ll leave with a way to diagnose where you are, a shared language for where you’re going, and a clear-eyed view of what AI still can’t do for you, because designing for the limits is the work now.