SHRM MENA’s MD on how AI is transforming the regional workforce
Vivek Arora, MD of SHRM MENA, says that AI’s biggest impact on the workforce will be the redesign of jobs, skills and responsibilities rather than outright replacement
19 September, 2026
TT
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Ask Vivek Arora about AI and jobs, and he reframes the question before answering it. “I don’t believe the most useful question is how many jobs AI will replace,” says the managing director of SHRM MENA, the global HR association. “The bigger question is how many jobs will be redesigned because of AI.” What makes MENA interesting, he says, is “the speed at which AI is moving from ambition to implementation.”
In the UAE and Saudi Arabia especially, it is “increasingly becoming part of how organisations operate, how governments deliver services and how businesses think about productivity and growth.” So far, he notes, the pattern is one of reinvention rather than removal: “We are already seeing roles being broken down into tasks” — what can be automated, what can be augmented, and where human judgement remains critical.
SHRM’s 2026 research points the same way; in organisations that have deployed AI, changes in job responsibilities are reported far more frequently than actual displacement. His conclusion follows from that. “AI strategy and workforce strategy can no longer sit in separate rooms,” he says. “If you are investing in technology, you also need to be thinking about job design, skills and how your people will work alongside it.”
Redesign, not replacement
The first wave, he observes, is landing on work that is “repetitive, rules-based or highly transactional,” already visible across customer service, administration, finance, recruitment, marketing, operations and several HR processes. But he is careful to add that “transformation doesn’t necessarily mean disappearance.”
Recruitment is the example he reaches for: AI can increasingly handle sourcing, screening, scheduling, drafting job descriptions and analysing talent data, which changes what a recruiter spends time doing rather than whether the recruiter is needed. “The value of the recruiter then shifts towards judgement, relationship building, assessment and advising the business on talent.”
New roles will emerge too, he says, around AI governance, workforce analytics, AI-enabled job design, responsible AI, data stewardship and human-AI collaboration — though he expects most to arrive as “new capabilities expected within existing roles” rather than new job titles. It is a distinction he thinks matters. “The bigger workforce shift may not be from old jobs to new jobs, but from old versions of jobs to new versions of them.”
If the jobs are changing, so is the skill set that fills them. “AI literacy will increasingly become a baseline capability,” Arora says — not that everyone needs to become a technologist, but that they should “understand how to work with AI, question its outputs and apply it responsibly.” Alongside that fluency, he expects growing value in the things technology cannot easily replicate: “judgement, critical thinking, creativity, communication, problem-solving and the ability to work through ambiguity.” He describes it as a paradox. “The more capable AI becomes, the more valuable distinctly human judgement becomes.” What matters most, in his view, is the willingness to keep learning: “Skills are changing too quickly for any qualification earned at the beginning of a career to carry someone through the next twenty years.”
From headcount to capability
That pace, he suggests, changes how organisations should plan. Workforce planning has traditionally started with roles — how many people, which positions. AI, he argues, calls for a different opening question: “What work needs to get done? Which tasks can technology perform? Which require people? And what skills will the organisation need as that balance changes?” The shift he describes is “from simply planning headcount to planning capability,” and it depends on firms understanding their current skills base far better than most do today.
The static three-to-five-year plan, he says, no longer works. “Organisations need much more dynamic skills intelligence, stronger internal mobility and continuous reskilling.” The ones that manage it well, he adds, won’t wait for a role to become obsolete before reacting: “They will identify how the role is changing and start preparing the person in that role for what comes next.”
The region’s gap, in his reading, is wider than a shortage of specialists. “There is certainly a capability gap, but I would define it more broadly than a shortage of AI specialists.” Beyond the technical shortage, he says, sits an “equally important” gap in helping the wider workforce apply AI within their own jobs, something one-off training does not solve. Learning has to sit “much closer to the work itself — practical, continuous and connected to real business problems,” and he encourages employers to look inward first.
“In many cases, the person you need tomorrow may already be working for you today; they simply need a pathway to build the next set of capabilities,” he says. That is particularly relevant in MENA, Arora notes, where organisations are managing rapid economic transformation, localisation priorities and competition for specialised talent at the same time.
HR’s role
AI, in Arora’s view, “has the potential to make HR significantly more strategic”, but only if the function “takes ownership of the workforce implications rather than treating AI purely as a technology issue,” because “every major AI decision eventually becomes a people decision.” Which work changes, which roles need redesigning, who needs to be reskilled, where human oversight should remain — “these are not questions that technology teams can answer alone.”
At the moment, he says, HR is too often left out of the discussion: SHRM’s 2026 research found more than half of organisations surveyed did not directly involve HR in their AI strategy, “a gap organisations need to address.” He puts the point simply. “HR doesn’t need to own AI. But HR absolutely needs to own the people strategy around AI.”
On how far to automate, Arora sets out a clear principle: “Automate the process where it creates value, but retain meaningful human accountability where decisions materially affect people.” AI is well suited to spotting patterns, processing large volumes of information and giving managers better insight, he says, but “hiring someone, evaluating their performance or making decisions about their career carries consequences that require context, judgement and accountability” — and AI “is only as reliable as the data, assumptions and governance around it.”
Efficiency, he argues, cannot be the only measure. The question, as he frames it, “is not simply, ‘Can we automate this?’ It should be, ‘Should we automate this, and what human oversight does this decision require?’”
That emphasis on practical application, he says, is the thinking behind the HR + AI Lab, a new feature of the 2026 conference. “HR leaders are no longer asking whether AI matters. They are asking what they should actually do with it.” The Lab is built around real HR challenges rather than technology for its own sake, looking at how AI can support talent acquisition, employee development and workforce decisions — “and equally importantly, what governance and human oversight need to sit around those applications.” He hopes leaders will leave “with a clearer understanding of where AI can create genuine value… and what it will take to implement it responsibly.”
The GCC opportunity
For the Gulf, Arora sees an opportunity on a national scale. The region is investing heavily in developing local talent, but, he cautions, “localisation cannot only be about increasing representation. The long-term opportunity is to build capability and create sustainable career pathways.” AI can support that work, he says — helping organisations see the skills they already have, identify gaps against future requirements, personalise learning, and connect people to internal opportunities “based on capability rather than only previous job titles.”
The measure of success, he suggests, should reflect that: “The measure of successful AI adoption shouldn’t only be how much more efficiently an organisation operates; it should also include whether it is building stronger workforce capability for the long term.”
With more than 2,000 business and HR leaders expected in Dubai, that is the conversation he hopes the conference will open up. “We need to move beyond the broad conversation about whether AI will change work. It already is.” The more useful discussion, he says, is about the choices that change forces, redesigning jobs rather than simply automating tasks, identifying skills before they become shortages, giving people genuine pathways into new roles, keeping human judgement where it matters, and measuring whether AI is improving both business performance and workforce capability.
“These are business questions,” he says, “not just HR or technology questions.” For the region, he adds, the ambition should be a larger one than speed of adoption: “The opportunity is bigger than adopting AI quickly. It is about building the workforce capable of turning that technology into sustainable economic and business value.”
