Nirit Cohen spent three decades at Intel and the past fifteen years studying the future of work, publishing on the topic years before it became a boardroom priority. In this conversation with Adam Brotman and Andy Sack, she examines what happens to entry-level jobs and organizational structure as companies begin handing tasks to AI agents.

Cohen challenges the idea that work can simply transition from people to AI, arguing that this underestimates the human judgment embedded in even routine-looking tasks. She distinguishes employability, executing work someone else designed, from entrepreneurship, knowing how to think with AI tools to create new value, and argues the latter is becoming the defining skill of the agentic era. The discussion also covers how AI is unbundling jobs into tasks that no longer map to traditional professions, and how the independent economy is becoming a training ground for these new capabilities.

For executives, the takeaway is that organizational redesign, not headcount reduction, is the real challenge: leaders need to rebuild how work is structured and how judgment is taught, not just decide which tasks to automate.