Shape of Teams of the Future: AI Builds, Workforces, Jobs, and Skillsets in 2025 and Beyond

How big of a team do you need for teams of the future? 

What skill sets to do these people need?

Learn from conversations being had in customer meetings in May 2025.

In this episode, Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek discusses the evolving landscape of team structures in the context of AI development. 

She explores the necessary skills for future team members, the preference of reskilling over layoffs, and how to align incentives for team success. The conversation also delves into innovative opportunities presented by AI and data, emphasizing the need for adaptable and skilled teams to thrive in a rapidly changing environment.

Provide feedback and get in touch: hello@hireclarity.ai

Takeaways

🤖 Teams: The future of teams is changing, especially in AI development.

📉 Hiring: Hiring needs are evolving; teams may not need to be large.

🔁 Reskilling: Reskilling existing employees can be more beneficial than layoffs.

🎯 Incentives: Aligning incentives can enhance team motivation and success.

💰 Efficiency: A small, skilled team can achieve significant revenue.

🧠 Humanity: Human interaction remains valuable despite automation.

🛠️ Upskilling: Upskilling in technical skills like Python is essential.

💼 Sales: Sales skills are crucial for team members in tech.

🧩 Empathy: Understanding customer pain points is key to success.

🔄 Adaptability: The ability to adapt and learn is vital for future team members.

Learn More

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Connect with Joan on LinkedIn

✨📘 Buy the Bestselling Wiley Book: Your AI Roadmap: Actions to Expand Your Career, Money, and Joy. Featured in Forbes!

Who is Joan?

Ranked the #4⁠⁠ in Voice AI Influencer, ⁠⁠Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek⁠⁠ is the CEO of ⁠⁠Clarity AI⁠⁠, Founder of ⁠⁠Women in Voice⁠⁠, & Host of ⁠⁠Your AI Roadmap⁠⁠. With a decade in software & AI, she has worked at Nuance, VERSA Agency, & OneReach.ai in data & analysis, product, & digital transformation. She's an investor & technical advisor to startup & enterprise. A CES & VentureBeat speaker & Harvard Business Review published author, she has a PhD & is based in Seattle.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to the Future of Teams
• 11:24 Reskilling vs. Layoffs in Team Dynamics
• 17:45 Innovative Opportunities with AI and Data

Transcript

0:00

Hey folks, welcome back to another episode of Your AI Roadmap. I am delighted to be speaking with you today about the future of the Shape of Teams. So I'm really excited about some of the pre-sales work that I'm doing, which I've done a few posts about, or a few podcast episodes, it feels like a post, about these customer meetings and kind of conversations I'm with customers. And you all keep downloading them. So my team says make more. keep giving the people what they like. So if you are just streaming this, if you do like this stuff, please download, like, subscribe, send it to your friend, your boss, whoever. We really appreciate that data as feedback. So I was talking to a customer today who is pitching one of the biggest car manufacturers in the world, I'm excited to say, and the senior stakeholders are really, really jazzed. and we're preparing the pitch and kind of objections that he might have in the room. I will say I've gotten to the point in my career where I want to be in the room. I don't like to be in the room adjacent to the big room. And I am walking down the street with my dog. So if you hear a few cars, So anyway, my customer and I are practicing. We are talking through objections. We are sharing. the demo video that we've made that talks about opportunities with digital twins, opportunities to integrate augmented reality, opportunities for predictive analytics, just the richness of the data that hits their pain points today of the problems that they're having and the problems for tomorrow that we foresee and kind of if we build structures well, if you've listened to my episode about AI castles or castles and good foundations and good infrastructure where we can build amazing things, the opportunities for this customer today and into the future. And as at the end of this conversation, my customer asked me one of those interesting questions. Well, it wasn't even a question actually, but I took it as a question because I'm curious what. He said, Joan, I'm really confident this is going to get greenlit. I feel really, really good about this. I think this takes care of all the things they're struggling with and we can build it for them. It's a win-win. they have money, etc. And he said, how fast can you hire? Is your team ready to scale up? And I kind of was thinking about this because he assumed the size of team that is needed for a build like this. But the reality of it is the question that I think about, how many people, humans, do we need for AI builds to build something? Because in the last episode I was talking about how many people there are in companies that are scaling to multi-million in revenue, and those teens being between 10 and 50 people. And so I'd like to just daydream with you today. I know this topic is a little tricky because it not only talks about the shape of teens, inherently talks about layoffs, right? The shape of companies and teams in the past and the shape of teams in the future are just not the same, right? I was talking to a broker today, a deal broker guy, and I said, you know, if the project proposal doesn't have AI in development build, it's bloated. And he said, bloated is a kind word, Joan. You can use some other language about that. So if we talk about looking at new projects and new teams and say, that's bloated without these efficiencies. Then what is the shape of the team? Who are the key players that need to be on these teams? What are the skill sets in the future that are pertinent to the one I'm building, the one other teams are building? How stakeholders can evaluate these new teams to say, hey, this is the right size of team. or this doesn't have enough people. we, you know, how do you evaluate that team and headcount justification? Yeah. So that's the question I want to talk to you about today. So he was like, you get ready to hire. And one of the key reasons my customer wants me to hire this customer is very, very hands on. So he does need a project manager to be there at all times of day and he is on the Eastern standard time zone. So there's like a customer service project manager person who has purview to say, yes, we're doing this. No, we're not doing that. Like I need that person. I know I need my CTO. We can build cool things with tools that help us with software builds, but we also need someone who has technical oversight. So for example, if you are called in the middle of the night, your system has gone down, whatever automated thing pings you and said, hey, something's not working, we've got a bug. You will need a human to review it. The phrase I use with customers is, You need someone to look at it before you turn your homework in, right? No matter what other tools you're using. So I know that I senior or mid-level at least, development, technical talent. need someone who reads code, who can fix bugs, who can debug. That's not everybody, right? But I do need that technical person. I do need a salesperson. See, now the thing is that this could be the same multiple persons, except if you want to scale. Okay. So let's, You need a salesperson, someone, I guess like me. I really might more see myself as the technical project manager in most days, but today I'm doing a lot of sales. talking to the customer and navigating what they say they want, what we can build for them, what they want today and what can actually scale for the goals that they have ultimately. So sales, project manager, code person, developer. are like the three key things that I see. You know, we could talk about marketing, scaling things, as you know, podcast editing or like video content editing is still a very manual process. So if you want to do that, but like three people, build, sell, manage. And so that could be the same two or three people doing several of those things, but ultimately your time doesn't scale. There's like a bottleneck where you have a certain number of customers and all of the customers want more time. And if all the customers want more time or, you know, how like synchronous time, time together is actually maybe one of the most expensive things, that human interaction, right? To have someone on site at your facility. Like that, that human piece is expensive, but also potentially some of the most valuable to your stakeholder. So in this example that I'm giving, my firm is an AI development firm right now. As we scale, I see us being more and more of a platform and kind of a data aggregation and build type of firm. We'll see how that grows and develops. But truly, if you only need two to three people to scale and close multimillion dollars of contracts, Then you also either want to probably hire great customer facing people who are really, really excellent in those meetings and on those calls. Multiple backups of senior talent. Like how you think about like reduplicating yourself. If you're like, okay, there's these three people that are working really hard on these projects. They're maxed out. There's no more efficiencies, simplifying automations. Like we have maxed out their capacity. Do we hire the exact same three replicates, another salesperson, another technical coder, another project manager person? Do we hire someone to help with growth marketing? Like what is that another, I sales mechanism? I guess, yeah, just as you think about, and maybe I would love, if you wanna email us, I'll continue asking for feedback. Does this match your expectations? But I think what I've seen more and more is these investor members that say, I am so excited for a team of three to five that can close multi-millions, that can have revenue above five to 10 million, just in a team of three that's lean, strong, players, just slightly offensive, but people who are working really hard and who are good at what they do, who are curious and learning-minded, are leveraging amazing AI tools to build things efficiently, cost-effective, and time-wise. I get it. I really get it. And that's scalability. So it's totally interesting that my customer's like, need to hire more. And he does need a lot of handholding in the most positive way. He loves brainstorming. He loves jumping on a call and talking about things. And we've been really educating each other, frankly, on the different parts of business. If we turn it around though and say, you know, Joan, you're talking about a zero to multimillion dollar company, you know, that's starting from scratch, right? That's going to start up in the most literal sense of the word. What if you're already at a company and you're like, Joan, how many people on the team is bloat? Does that immediately mean that we need to do layoffs? And I would say no. I have worked on chat bots. I've worked in the conversational AI space for a long time on enterprise projects for Fortune 1000, Fortune 500 customers, tinkered with the backend of Verizon, If we talk about the shape of Teams and the changes, I would say, so here's an example specifically. We were looking at a conversational bot that would automate a ton of phone calls. for customer service. I know those are annoying, but sometimes the customer service bot is like, are you looking for this? You need to fill out this form. And so we could remove a bunch of phone calls that were made up into the call center. And the team was reviewing this. They're like, great, great, great. We're going to build this. Wonderful, wonderful. And then they're like, wait a minute. What's Lisa going to do with her time now? If we automate this, they just won't have work. And they were like, we don't want to fire Lisa. And I was like, I agree with you. Like I don't think I wouldn't make that recommendation to fire her. I would re-skill. So if you have talent that's been working for years, if you have people you trust, et cetera, I would strongly recommend you upskill them. Can they go into a management position? Can they be upskilled in sales? Can you teach some of them how to debug code? What are the skillsets of the future work? Are they going to be entrepreneurial? and start their own teams, which is what I recommend to everybody. Get your own income streams going. But how do we... You could do layoffs. You totally could. I strongly recommend having the right people, the right talent in the room. If you already think they're in the building, why would you just say goodbye to them? So having the right team, all rowing the boat in same direction is a really, really special thing that doesn't happen all the time. And so I think having the right talent in the room, working on things together that is generating revenue, is generating profit, it has an impact to the customer. Yeah, I really see that as the future. And I will say, as I was talking to another customer today, I was like, you know, here are the opportunities. We need to review everything and make you the proposal. But this is kind of what I'm seeing at the benchmark. he's like, really? You could do that. And in this timeframe, it was like, indeed, I'm confident my team can do this for you. If we're doing it so much more cheaply with these tools, I would like to talk about aligned incentives I mentioned this on the last episode, where are the aligned incentives to me, not just seeing that we can do it so much more efficiently and you pay almost exactly the same price and I'm just making higher and higher margins of profit. Is there an opportunity for aligned incentives where I say I would like equity share of this company that we're building? Like I'm building here in the platform, you give me equity in the company with aligned incentives as this company grows in value. Is there an opportunity for revenue share for every dollar that comes into this business? My business also sees a piece of that as you scale if there isn't going to be a merger or acquisition in a certain timeframe. Now, how do we align incentives so that the development team that's building the thing sees it as valuable to spend literal time? If time is the most valuable thing here, time and money, how do we align? How do we make it valuable to everybody? And I mentioned that to this customer today said, if we didn't do it this efficiently for you, for real, we can potentially build you something more valuable. How do you feel about some equity share? And he's like, honestly, this sounds even more interesting to me than the last thing you just mentioned. Like having a team that's going to work arm in arm with us, who's not just going to build us something and leave us in the cold. This testing point for bigger and bigger contracts. different bells and whistles. And I said, you know, my team is working to future proof. There are amazing things coming out in the next six to 12 months. I have guesses what they might be. We can talk more about that later. But like we want to be modular. You want a team that's dynamic, that is thinking data-driven, AI forward. This is a core component of platform builds for today and into the future. That's my mentality. That's my team's mentality. love it or leave it. But that's how we think about efficient, quality, data-driven, profitable builds. He was very amenable and I'm looking forward to that one moving forward. And that's the core products that we have been selling more and more. the opportunity to put I looked up like datadump.com. My CTO said that was the ugliest name. We need to talk to some branding person. But we dump data into something, that we get it structured, we get it organized, and we can build amazing, amazing things. We can build personalization. We can build anomaly detection. We can build dashboards. We can build, what are some fun things I'm building? We can build time sensitive data sets that are helpful for predictive yields. We can build IOT that can work at the edge and support farming practices in places all around the world and that stakeholders anywhere in the world can get real time data at a very, very high fidelity level. We can build digital twins so that people can walk through a space for let's say a wedding, they can visualize the wedding and walk through different scenarios while not even being at the venue. Similarly with Digital Twins, we can walk through the whole hotel as we do HVAC installations. The list of what we can do continues to expand and how efficiently we can build with these multimodal datasets that are voice enabled, image enabled, digital twins, data rich, rich in opportunities, continues to surprise me and excite me about the creative opportunities in front of us. So I hope this has given you food for thought about the shape of teams in the future. I just mentioned a marketing branding person, so there's certainly room for that. Maybe a fractional chief marketing officer capacity, kind of that CMO. role, which I certainly done projects about that in the past, but the core build and sell, I see continuing to be the thing. And then other bells and whistles and flywheels and, you know, Instagram ads or LinkedIn outbound reach, blah, blah, blah, is happening for Legion is being important. But yeah, that's food for thought about from the wild. How big does a team need to be? What skill sets do team members need to have in the future and how can you build them for yourself to be on that team in the future? good people relationship skills for that manager, your ability to negotiate and navigate and do really good customer work. I would really recommend reading the book. how to make friends and influence people. I would really think about your human skills for the technical one. I strongly recommend your cross-functional, your ability to talk to other people about deadlines and your empathy, as well as your ability to just do some Python. Python will get you very, very far, my friend. So I would upscale in some Python. You can go find, you can work with chat, you can teach up skill in Python. Python is so easy these days to learn, basically free online. Let's see. And then sales. negotiating, understanding pain points. A lot of sales for me is listening. What are they saying? What are they not saying? And deciding on dollar signs and the follow up of the paid work that needs to be done. Sales maybe, well, I'm growing in sales. I have a lot of technical capacity. I've got a lot of the managing and managing up capacities. And it's the sales acumen of the handshakes and moving it forward that is has been my growth area in the past three years, I'll say. I have closed six and seven figure deals, but I look forward to continuing growing in that capacity myself. I hope you liked this episode. If you really enjoyed it, please make sure to download, like, subscribe, send it to your friend who's thinking about jobs of the future and giving us feedback by sending us an email. If you'd like, I'll leave that in the show notes as well. Hope you're having a wonderful day and talk soon on another episode of Your AI Roadmap. Bye.