From People to Prompts: The New Era of Talent Management
For decades, “talent” meant people.
Our org charts, our performance reviews, our succession plans—all centered around the humans in the system. But that definition... is outdated.
Today, talent includes more than people. It includes the tools, systems, and AI agents and models that deliver value, execute tasks, and even make decisions. If your talent strategy isn’t expanding to include artificial collaborators, you’re already behind.
Human + AI: A New Kind of Workforce
Talent management has traditionally been about optimizing the people you have. But in a world powered by automation and generative intelligence, your smartest “employee” might not be a person. It might be a bot that clears support tickets or a prompt-trained model that crafts your marketing copy in seconds.
You’re most talented team member right now might not be a person. It might be a prompt.
It might be time to redefine what we mean by “talent” in the first place. Talent now includes two categories:
Human talent—those with judgment, empathy, creativity, and leadership.
Machine talent—those that execute tasks at speed, scale, and precision.
Both are valuable. Both are needed. And both must be managed.
AI and humans are no longer on separate tracks. They’re coworkers. Different forms of talent, operating side by side, solving problems from different angles—but aligned toward the same goals.
Proof Is in the Policy: What CEOs Are Already Doing
This shift isn’t abstract. It’s happening right now at the highest levels of leadership.
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke announced a new company policy: asking teams to show that they’ve tried AI solutions before putting a role up for hiring. In other words—prove that the job can’t be done by AI before you hire a human.
Duolingo followed a similar path. Their leadership publicly shared that they reduced their contractor workforce after deploying GPT-based tools to support content generation, copywriting, and translation. They weren’t cutting people—they were recalibrating what “talent” looks like in a modern, AI-integrated organization.
We’re seeing this logic echoed by more CEOs every week.
The Rise of “Talent Symphonics”
If you’re in talent management, your scope just got wider.
You’re no longer just hiring, developing, and promoting people. You’re orchestrating an ecosystem of both human and machine capabilities. And your job is to make that ecosystem hum.
This is what we like to call Talent Symphonics—the strategic composition of human and machine talent working in concert. Not just job design. Not just capability development. But dynamic, orchestrated, ever-evolving performance.
Great talent leaders won’t just be HR experts. They’ll be conductors of complex systems where people and AI play different instruments—but follow the same score.
Of course, orchestrating a true Talent Symphonics approach is no small feat. It takes intention to align the right capabilities—human and machine—across roles, workflows, and culture. Getting it to hum requires more than strategy decks; it requires real operational shifts.
One powerful example? Teaming. As organizations embrace this new age of teaming, they’re rethinking what it means to collaborate—not just across functions, but across intelligence types. At Cultivate, we partner with companies to reimagine teaming for this new era and ensure that AI isn't just bolted on, but embedded as a strategic part of their culture and talent symphonic strategies.
Welcome to the New Talent Mandate
AI isn’t a threat to talent management. It’s a new branch of it.
Talent is no longer human by default. It’s a blend of intelligence types, working in real- time. And the leaders who thrive in this new era will be those who stop asking, “What roles do we need to fill?” and start asking, “What outcomes do we need to deliver—and which talents (human or machine) can help us get there?”
Cultivate empowers organizations to not just adapt to change, but to lead in shaping the future of work. Let us help you build a thriving culture now — send us a message.
