The Job Description Gap AI Is Widening

Summary

Responsibilities pile up while outdated tasks never get formally subtracted, and one seat's drift cascades into the roles around it. As a result, job descriptions rarely keep pace with how a role actually evolves, especially as AI reshapes what the work requires. However, replacing an "underperforming" employee is usually the wrong response. Auditing job descriptions regularly, rather than treating hiring as the fix is the more effective long-term move.

By Lisa Heay, Vice President of Business Operations at Heinz Marketing

Picture a role on your team that isn’t working. The person in the seat is smart, works hard, and has been at the company for years, but the output keeps missing the mark. The easy conclusion is that they’ve lost a step, maybe they’ve gotten complacent, or just aren’t the right fit anymore.

Look closer, though, because what may become clear is that the job description hasn’t been rewritten in years, while the real work that makes up the role has changed dramatically. The person isn’t failing. The seat is.

How the Drift Happens

This change doesn’t happen all at once. What happens is usually smaller and harder to notice: a “can you also just handle this” here, a new tool that needs someone to own it there. Maybe someone leaves and someone else picks up a few random responsibilities. None of these additions get formalized and no one says that the role has officially changed. Things just pile up until the job someone is doing has little in common with the one they were hired for.

I see this from the ops side from time to time. We’re the ones pulling capacity reports and building next quarter’s resourcing plan, so we’re looking directly at what people spend their time on, not what their title says they do. When a role opens up, we sit down to write the job description, and that’s often the first time anyone has held the old job description next to the real workload. The gap between them then becomes obvious fast. Further, when a team asks for more headcount or another contractor to cover something isn’t getting done, that is an even clearer sign that a seat has drifted.

Nothing Subtracted Either

It works the other way, too: when a tool or an AI agent takes over part of a job, that task rarely gets removed from the role. Old work may never get subtracted once it no longer needs a person to do it. The seat gets even more disjointed with more added, nothing removed, and the person in it ends up missing the mark.

AI Accelerating the Problem

AI accelerates both sides of the issue. A content role that used to be mostly about writing is now also about editing AI output, developing good prompts, fact checking, and knowing when to trust a draft versus rewriting it from scratch. Maybe it’s about defining the human perspective so it’s not just AI slop. That’s new work piling on, usually without anyone touching the job description.

A demand gen role that used to involve building campaigns end to end might now only require reviewing what an AI agent has already built and deciding whether it’s ready for launch. That’s old work that should have been subtracted, but often isn’t, because nobody explicitly said, “you no longer need to do this manually.”

Why Replacing the Person Is Usually the Wrong Move

Once this all becomes visible, the instinct is to look outside the organization for someone who already fits this new version of the role. However, hiring, onboarding, and the ramp up time for someone new to catch up to the context the last person already had usually costs more in the long run than people expect. The person already in the seat knows the buyers, the internal politics, and the history of what’s been done before.

There could also be a hiring challenge. Plenty of people are strong marketers, and plenty are fluent in AI tools, but far fewer are both. Finding that person isn’t impossible, but it could take a while to find the unicorn you need.

Cascade to other Seats

A seat rarely drifts in isolation. When one role absorbs new responsibilities or keeps doing work that should have been automated, it changes what the roles around it are expected to cover, too. Hand-offs shift, and assumptions about who owns what get outdated without anyone intentionally deciding that.

This is why fixing one seat at a time can feel like it never quite solves the problem. The seat next to it absorbed some of the same drift, and nobody has looked at that one yet either.

Rebuild the Seat

In most cases, the better move is to rebuild the seat around what job the organization needs done. That starts with an honest conversation about what the role requires today, not what it required when it was created, covering both what’s been added and what should finally be taken off the plate.

It usually means rewriting the job description and being explicit about which parts of the old job an AI tool or agent can now handle. It should also mean revisiting the compensation level and performance expectations, not just the title. Don’t let a role grow more valuable for years before the pay or the role level reflects it.

Of course, this isn’t true in every case. Sometimes a role really has become obsolete, and the honest answer is that it needs to go away entirely. But that’s a different conversation than the one most teams need to have. Most teams are treating a design problem like a performance problem, and it’s costing them people who were never the issue in the first place.

Finally, job descriptions should not be set and forget.  They need regular audit and review to ensure accuracy over time.

Wrapping it Up

If a role on your team feels like it’s underperforming, before making any decisions about the person, it’s worth asking a more basic question: when was this job description last rewritten to reflect how the work really happens now? For most roles touched by AI or new workflows in the last year or two, the honest answer is it probably hasn’t.

That’s not a talent gap, it’s a design gap, and it’s fixable a lot faster than replacing someone and hoping the next person fits a seat that hasn’t been adapted to what the organization really needs now.

It can help to have someone outside the day-to-day look at the seat with you, to bring a fresh perspective. It’s hard to see this clearly when you’re the one who wrote the original job description and have to look the person in the eye afterward.

At Heinz Marketing, we’ve developed an AI Readiness Audit built specifically for B2B GTM teams who want to move fast and actually get there. If you’re planning AI investments in the next three to six months, we’d love to talk through where you are and what might be standing in your way. Email us at acceleration@heinzmarketing.com.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay