AI Kills Tasks, Not Jobs, But Culture Must Change First

Q: Collective is not only sponsoring but also co-organizing Perspectives 2026. What does this space bring to the region?

A: Perspectives 2026 was created last year to mark our 10th anniversary as a talent development consultancy. We identified a clear gap in the industry: while sector-specific events were abundant, there was no forum where functions and industries converged to bring decision-makers together around the future of work. 

We designed this space to address questions that often lack definitive answers: how to develop talent at scale, how to set a meaningful organizational vision, and how to responsibly implement transformative technologies. The event brings together Collective’s talent expertise, Endeavor’s innovation ecosystem, and Cometa’s venture capital lens. Our measure of success is simple: we want attendees to leave with better, more informed questions than the ones they arrived with.

Q: In a world where AI is redefining everything and the geopolitical context is increasingly complex, what does it mean to develop a leader for the future today?

A: We are operating in an environment of simultaneous tensions, influenced by ongoing geopolitical conflicts, inflationary pressure, and softening consumption. Yet, capital markets are at historic highs precisely because of AI investment. In this context, the first competency we build with our corporate partners is identity and purpose, because purpose is not anchored to a job description; it is about who you are and the direction you have chosen. 

Beyond that, the critical leadership capabilities we focus on are: collaboration, working effectively with both other humans and intelligent systems such as agents and automation tools; agility, the capacity to continuously reinvent oneself at the individual, team, and functional levels; vision, the ability to read the trajectory of one’s industry and organization and locate oneself within it; and learning to learn, cultivating a lifelong apprentice mindset as the pace of change renders static knowledge obsolete.

Q: What is the most common error companies make when trying to transform their talent in the face of technological disruption?A: The most pervasive mistake is conflating tool adoption with transformation. Organizations invest in AI platforms, ERPs, or productivity suites and assume behavioral change will follow automatically. It does not. Every technological transformation is, at its core, a cultural transformation, and culture must change first.

If you migrate your organization from one email provider to another without addressing underlying mindsets and processes, nothing of substance changes. The technology becomes shelf ware. Sustainable transformation requires sequencing: shift the culture and redesign the processes, and the technology will then have fertile ground in which to take root.

Q: How does Collective measure whether an intervention has actually transformed an organization?

A: We apply a methodology based on the Kirkpatrick Model across four progressive levels of measurement. The first is reaction, capturing immediate participant sentiment through Net Promoter Score. The second is behavior, assessing what observable changes leaders identify in their teams following the intervention, with deliberate emphasis on translating learning into concrete action. The third is results, evaluating whether the team’s output is moving the needle on business performance and quarterly objectives. The fourth is KPIs, tracking how team behaviors are influencing the organization’s broader metrics over time. This framework allows us to move the conversation about talent development away from activity metrics and toward demonstrable business impact.

Q: How do you adapt global research and trends, often produced in English and in different cultural contexts, to the realities of Latin America?

A: We source the most forward-looking research available globally — frameworks such as Christa Wallace’s Portfolio Life concept — and adapt it not merely in language, but in cultural architecture. Effective communication, for example, looks structurally different across the European Union, North America, and Latin America, and a program that ignores those differences will underperform.   

We refer to this process internally as “tropicalization”: the deliberate reframing of concepts and terminology so that participants see their own reality reflected in the content, which is a prerequisite for genuine behavioral change.

 

Q: How is Collective evolving alongside AI, and what does that signal about the future of work?

A: To credibly lead organizations through transformation, we must first transform ourselves, and we have. We now operate with about 25% fewer collaborators than in 2024, while having doubled our revenue. This was not the result of layoffs, but of a deliberate decision not to backfill roles where natural attrition occurred once we identified that AI could absorb those specific workstreams, such as a commercial agent managing WhatsApp-based client communication. 

The more precise framing is that AI does not eliminate jobs; it eliminates the tasks that no one found meaningful in the first place. Our long-term conviction is that Collective  will still be relevant in a century, because the fundamental challenge — helping people evolve from positional authority into genuine leadership — is one that no technology will render unnecessary.