Corporate tech departments are seeking the expertise of their human-resources counterparts—and the other way around—as businesses across the country sort through the workforce impacts of artificial intelligence.

AI is already wreaking havoc on the white-collar workforce, with chief executives increasingly admitting that the technology will wipe out jobs.

Looking ahead, remaining employees face a workplace transformed by new processes, new “digital” workers and new organizational structures designed to better harness AI’s potential.

It isn’t only a technological shift, but also a cultural one. And the chief information officers responsible for rolling it out say they are joining with their HR peers to teach employees how to use the technology, and not to fear it. They also need HR to help manage the impact of so-called digital co-workers, or AI agents, which are the bots that can perform tasks on behalf of humans.

Networking-equipment maker Cisco is bringing together its IT and HR departments to figure out what its workforce will look like with a “virtual staff of AI entities” working alongside roughly 86,200 employees, according to CIO Fletcher Previn. “That will be an interesting frontier where we’ll work closely with HR and figure out, ‘Does [the previous] chain of command still make sense in an AI agent world?’”

Job-search company Indeed has a “transformation office,” led by Vice President of AI Hannah Calhoon, which works with HR but sits under the technology team. Once Calhoon’s team has identified specific ways in which AI can help Indeed’s over 10,000 employees, they reach out to their HR counterparts, who have “expertise around learning and development, and scaling up solutions,” she said.

Even Microsoft, the tech giant behind many of the AI tools that workers use, is undergoing its own internal AI evolution. Katy George, the company’s corporate vice president of workforce transformation, moved to the position from an HR strategy role earlier this year to help Microsoft shape AI’s impact on its roughly 228,000 employees.

George said Microsoft’s workforce transformation group, which is made up of eight people, is an extension of CEO Satya Nadella’s office, but also works closely with the company’s information-technology department and HR group.

“Business transformation is about changing how we all as humans are doing our work, and therefore HR is an incredibly important enabler to create the flexibility to learn and evolve, but also to chart the course,” George said.

Yet as AI transforms the way businesses think about hiring and retaining employees, there have already been job losses.

Microsoft in July said it would cut 9,000 workers, adding to the 6,000 roles that the company eliminated in May across its product and software development teams.

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