Brendan Hooft, CEO & Managing Partner of ESPER.
Nobody asks me whether AI matters anymore. Across the Gulf, national agendas such as Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 have set the ambition, and investment is flowing. The question I now hear from ministers and CEOs is harder: We want to become AI-native. What does that mean, and how do we get there?
Here is my answer. AI-native is not technology you install: it is a workforce that reinvents how you work and why you exist. Most organizations have added AI to the work they already do; AI-native rebuilds the work itself. For an enterprise, that means how you create returns for employees, customers and shareholders; for a government, how you create value for citizens. For every individual, it opens the most generative question of all: not what we do, but who we could become.
In Conducting The Human-AI Symphony and The Rise Of The Conductor, I described the Symphony and the Conductor that builds it. Both rest on one premise: AI succeeds or fails on people and capabilities. So becoming AI-native starts with talent management. Patching will not do. Zero-based talent management rebuilds it, org chart included, around what people and AI can do together. It is an invitation to design the organization you want.
What follows is the playbook: five movements, in order, because none works without the one before.
First Movement: Set The Score
An uncomfortable truth: training people on AI does not make an organization AI-native. Academies and vendor upskilling programs multiply across the region, yet few target what a specific role needs. Most organizations I work with run multiple taxonomies, none AI-native. One Saudi public sector entity had two. Neither covered AI nor aligned with the national Digital Sector Skills Framework.
Adopt one governed standard for AI capabilities, professional skills and behavioral competencies, aligned to the national standard where one exists. Every later movement plays from it.
Do we have one governed capability standard, or several that disagree?
Second Movement: Rewrite The Parts
Next, the workforce you have. For every role, define the tasks performed, the outcomes delivered and which tasks agents can now take on. Job titles tell you little; designing around them is the most common mistake I see.
Then map the standard to each role, choosing the competencies it needs and at what proficiency. That is your definition of high performance. I weight behavioral competencies slightly more: technical skills have a short half-life, while agency, judgment, creativity and adaptability outlast any tool.
Skip this step and programs misfire. I have seen a government-wide AI acceleration program put executives through technical training with little bearing on their roles.
Which tasks in this role can an agent take today, and who decides?
Third Movement: Tune The Orchestra
Now assess everyone, role by role. How you frame it decides whether people lean in or push back. A Writer and Workplace Intelligence survey found 29% of employees admit to sabotaging their company’s AI strategy, rising to 44% among Gen Z. Tell people AI is coming for their jobs, and resistance becomes rational.
The message has to inspire, not just inform. Start with the executive team: leaders who go first, honest about their gaps, earn everyone else’s trust. People should come away knowing their strengths, their priority gaps and, often, adjacent roles. In one entity, the leader explained the purpose and what it meant for people’s growth before anyone was assessed. It remains one of the most empowering launches I’ve seen.
Would our people call the assessment empowering, or an audit?
Fourth Movement: Seat The Players
Assessment gives you what most organizations have never had: a trusted, person-by-person record of capability. Our unified talent management framework rests on one rule: every talent decision draws from that record.
Four capabilities change most. Performance management weighs outcomes and behaviors, including how well people direct and check their agents. Organizational design starts from the capability you need, then tests it against what you have, human, agent or hybrid. Succession and mobility rest on demonstrated capability, not tenure, surfacing internal candidates before a role is advertised.
The remaining four follow the same logic: talent acquisition, learning and development, employee experience and change management. All eight sit between your AI strategy and the performance you expect.
Build this into the HR and learning systems you already run. Gartner found only 1% of layoffs in the first half of 2025 came from AI raising productivity, and cautions that some organizations will end up rehiring for the roles they cut. A current capability record shows who can move before anyone is let go.
Which talent decision last month was made without looking at capability?
Fifth Movement: Conduct Continuously
A platform is now an imperative: you cannot conduct what you cannot hear. Capability has to be live in two directions. Executives need a real-time view by role and business unit, so they can decide in days, not quarters, what to build, buy or hand to agents. Every individual needs their own view: where they stand and the paths open to them. One record feeds mobility, succession, learning and design, so the orchestra plays from one score, not a dozen spreadsheets.
Can every leader and every person see their capability position today?
The Leadership Moment
None of this is a technology project. It is a trust project, and it starts with leaders, the first conductors any organization must build. People commit to change done with them, not to them.
At LEAP 2026 in Riyadh, a 14-year-old boy asked me how he should future-proof himself. Ministers ask me the same question on behalf of millions. He deserves the answer they get: not another course, but a clear view of what he could become, and a path there.
Orchestras aren’t made great on the night of the concert. They’re made great in rehearsal, by a conductor who knows the score, listens to every player and believes in what each of them can become.
The rehearsal can start this week.
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