Crown Your AI Value Partner—The One Hire That Turns Humans × Machines into Margin
Why every P&L leader—and every CHRO—needs a human-plus-AI strategist at their side before competitors lock them up.
We’ve hit an inflection point: every board I brief is staring at two dashboards. One shows AI pilots, demos, and shiny press releases. The other shows the stark KPI delta between companies that moved beyond “innovation theater” and those still admiring the problem. That gap just became a canyon.
With AI adoption snowballing, talent premiums spiking, and competitors already wiring human-plus-machine workflows into the heart of their P&Ls, you no longer have quarters to experiment—you have months.
The hire (or crowning) of an AI Value Partner isn’t a “future of work” talking point; it’s the keystone move that decides whether 2025 closes with audited impact or uncomfortable explanations.
The six-month fuse
“78 % of companies already use AI in at least one business function—up from 55 % a year ago,” McKinsey’s State of AI 2025 reports. mckinsey.com
“92 % of large-company executives plan to increase AI investment in the next three years,” the Thunderbit 2025 data roundup finds. thunderbit.com
“Forty-two percent of ‘AI high performers’ already attribute 20 %-plus of EBIT to AI,” McKinsey’s global survey shows. mckinsey.com
Median U.S. machine-learning-engineer pay at Adobe now starts at $206 K (Levels.fyi, July 2025). levels.fyi
The treadmill is at sprint speed. If an AI Value Partner (AVP) isn’t converting AI intent into audited dollars by 31 December, you’ll be explaining to investors how rivals sprinted ahead while you were still watching demos instead of defining intent.
Why the badge reads AI Value Partner
“AI belongs at the revenue table—never in the help-desk ticket queue.”
A vendor demo won’t save you
Buying another platform is like hiring a gym to do your push-ups. Tools amplify capability; only insiders reshape data, culture, and daily decisions.
That insider is the AVP—part strategist, part builder, part change-infuser.
Five litmus-test questions to spot—or crown—your AVP
(Each blends mindset, heart-set, skill-set, tool-set, and continuous changefulness.)
Which customer or employee pain keeps you awake, and what first experiment would you launch this month to ease it?
Tell me about the last time you persuaded a sceptic to try a new workflow—what changed for them?
Describe the moment you felt true flow rebuilding something—what skill were you stretching?
If every tool vanished but two, which would you keep and why would we still hit target?
Priorities just pivoted overnight—what dashboard will you show in 30 days to prove progress?
Nail three or more and you’re likely paying an uncrowned AVP already.
CHROs: your fingerprints belong on this hire
Chief Human Resource Officers sit at the intersection of strategy, skills, and psyche. No one else is accountable for:
Skill-map reality checks. You know which repeatable, auditable, documented (“RAD”) tasks are ripe for augmentation—and which capabilities will be freed for higher-value work.
FOBO antidote. Fear of Becoming Obsolete melts faster when HR champions human-machine teaming stories instead of pink-slip myths.
Changefulness coaching. An AVP isn’t just a tech pilot; they are a culture catalyst. HR must coach, reward, and replicate that muscle across the org.
Leadership matchmaking. You already broker talent moves across functions—extend that craft to seat AVPs next to every P&L owner.
Value scoreboard. People analytics can track the before/after uplift that proves the human × machine dividend.
If HR doesn’t co-own this seat, it risks watching AI strategy happen to the workforce rather than with it.
Anoint before you recruit
Spot the colleague who sketches workflows on napkins, prototypes on weekends, and hoards prompt snippets. Give them the badge, a budget, and a 30-day mission.
One crowned insider beats a six-month external search every time.
Head-count frozen? Here’s the business case
Cost-neutral swap – sunset one low-ROI vacancy; fund the AVP.
Capacity dividend – Mercer pilots show 30–40 % cycle-time cuts in six weeks, freeing humans for higher-value work.
Risk hedge – the AVP’s live ROI dashboard arms you for every board meeting.
Win the turf war
Sketch the Role Charter—skip HR boilerplate
Mission: Unlock $X of [revenue / margin / capacity] in [function] by Q4 2025 through AI-powered redesign of RAD work.
90-Day Outcomes:
Pinpoint one RAD (repeatable, auditable, documented) process throttling customer impact (e.g., product-training content creation).
Launch a human-plus-machine pilot that halves manual hours.
Publish an impact dashboard tied to the metric that matters—customer impact, profit, patient satisfaction, etc.
Coach three new champions to replicate the playbook.
Flight-home epiphany, wrapped
Somewhere between Seoul and Minneapolis, I replayed the “single front door” intranet launch that once rewired how work worked. The AVP is today’s version of that moment—but with AI rocket fuel.
Hire—or anoint—one AVP per business line in the next 178 days and toast measurable impact on New Year’s Eve. Skip it, and spend 2026 explaining why someone else’s AVP moved them from 0 to 1 in a way you have been looking to move towards.
Need a sanity-check? I’m happy to talk with your prospective AVP and confirm they’re ready before the clock hits zero. Reach out—let’s make work sing.
About Jason Averbook
Jason Averbook is a globally recognized thought leader, advisor, and keynote speaker focused on the intersection of AI, human potential, and the future of work. He is the Senior Partner and Global Leader of Digital HR Strategy at Mercer, where he helps the world’s largest organizations reimagine how work gets done — not by implementing technology, but by transforming mindsets, skillsets, and cultures to be truly digital.
Over the last two decades, Jason has advised hundreds of Fortune 1000 companies, co-founded and led Leapgen, authored two books on the evolution of HR and workforce technology, and built a reputation as one of the most forward-thinking voices in the industry. His work challenges leaders to stop seeing digital transformation as an IT project and start embracing it as a human strategy.
Through his Substack, Now to Next, Jason shares honest, provocative, and practical insights on what’s changing in the workplace — from generative AI to skills-based orgs to emotional fluency in leadership. His mission is simple: to help people and organizations move from noise to clarity, from fear to possibility, and from now… to next.
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