By Michael Domanic, Section Head of AI

A portion of your AI budget is sitting in open job postings.

Here’s what happens: Someone at your company gives notice. Within a week, their manager has pulled up the old job description, updated the date, and sent it to recruiting. Nobody stops to ask whether the job still looks the way it did when that description was written, even though some of the work in it has been handled by an agent for months.

That moment is the easiest place to partially fund your AI transformation - and to start to reshape what your company looks like. 

The math

A 1,000-person company with 12% attrition turns over roughly 120 roles a year. That's about $13M in payroll walking out the door, most of which gets immediately re-approved as backfills.

Hold a quarter of those seats open for twelve months and you free up about $3.25M a year. A full AI transformation budget for a company that size runs about $6.6M a year. 

Held backfills won't cover all of it, but they can cover roughly half, and they come with no layoffs, no headcount announcement, and no new line item for your CFO to fight you on. The money was already in the plan - you're just deciding it's better spent on the thing already doing part of the job.

The rest has to come from somewhere else: vendor and agency spend, software you no longer need, and the discretionary half of your L&D budget. But backfills are the place to start, because they're tied directly to work AI is already doing.

So my advice is simple: fund AI from the backfills you no longer need, instead of asking for new money.

Only hold what's already working

Backfills will be easiest to hold when agents are already doing a meaningful share of the work. You should know where that’s happening because you can see what agents are doing and which teams rely on them. Those are the obvious seats to hold.

But even when an agent isn’t already doing the work, it’s good management practice to resist immediately backfilling an open role. Give it a little time. See what breaks, what gets absorbed, and what turns out not to be necessary at all. Sometimes you need the role; sometimes you’re just used to having it.

A held seat can always be reopened. At twelve months, you either close the role, refill it as it was, or refill it as a redesigned job.

Reward teams that are saving headcount 

Make sure you don’t accidentally punish the teams that adopted AI first by shrinking their headcount with no benefit. If building an agent means losing headcount, managers will stop building agents. 

Give some of the savings back to those teams, whether that's a bigger inference budget, better tools, or public credit for the people who did the work. 

What to do this week

Pull every open job req and every departure you expect over the next two quarters. Take each one to its hiring manager and ask the question: if this seat stays empty, where does the work go? Sort the answers into three piles: refill as is, refill as a redesigned role, and hold.

Add up the salaries in the hold pile. That's the first line of your AI funding, and probably the biggest single one. It's also the easiest conversation you'll have with your CFO all year.

See you next week,

Michael

Your fellow Head of AI

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