As AI reshapes hiring and the wider labour market, HR-technology vendor Phenom has acquired Included AI, an agentic people-analytics platform, arguing that AI will reset how work is organised rather than simply eliminate jobs. Independent forecasts suggest the near-term displacement will be real but modest.
The acquisition
Phenom announced on 14 January 2026 that it had acquired Included AI, a platform that surfaces workforce insights to support faster hiring and retention decisions. Phenom plans to fold Included’s technology into its own products so HR professionals and business leaders can access deeper people-analytics tools and more actionable insight into how their workforces are deployed.
The deal lands amid a difficult job market in which a number of employers have cut roles and attributed the reductions to AI. Yet several analyses suggest the direct effect of automation on employment is smaller than the headlines imply.
What the forecasts actually say
A Forrester forecast published the same week projected that AI and automation would account for about 6% of US jobs — roughly 10 million roles — lost by 2030. Notably, the same report found AI far more likely to influence or augment jobs (around 20%) than to replace them outright, and predicted that many layoffs blamed on AI would quietly be reversed as firms confront the practical difficulty of substituting human workers.
Phenom’s view: a reset, not an apocalypse
Mahe Bayireddi, Phenom’s co-founder and chief executive, frames AI’s role as enhancing work and creating new jobs as it automates the most routine tasks. In his account, the company assesses every workflow along three dimensions — what can be automated, what can be scaled and what can be made agentic — and finds that fully end-to-end automation is rarely achievable anywhere. In frontline areas such as recruiting and talent acquisition, he suggests 70–80% of a workflow can be automated, but the endpoints still require people; which portions are automated depends on the job type, location and industry.
Bayireddi illustrates the dynamic with radiology. As the cost of CT and MRI scans has fallen and the population has aged, the number of scans performed has risen sharply. Even where AI handles part of the interpretation, a substantial share of the work still needs human oversight, so the radiologist’s role changes rather than disappears. His broader point echoes a well-known economic pattern: when the cost of a service falls and demand rises, work is transformed at a fundamental level — some job families shrink or vanish while others, sometimes unexpected ones, emerge.
Where the impact concentrates
Not all jobs are affected equally, in Bayireddi’s view. Frontline roles in retail, nursing and manufacturing are, he argues, relatively insulated because robotics remains less advanced, while knowledge work is where visible replacement is occurring. He characterises the current moment as a “reset” of how work gets done, with people analytics as the connective layer that helps organisations see which tasks to automate, which to augment and which to keep manual — and how to move people between functions as roles shift, whether from HR into finance, finance into tech, or marketing into sales.
Limitations and what to watch
Several caveats apply. Phenom is a vendor with a commercial interest in an optimistic, augmentation-led narrative, so its framing should be weighed accordingly; the executive commentary here reflects one company’s perspective rather than an independent assessment. Forecasts such as Forrester’s are projections built on assumptions about productivity and adoption that can change, and different analysts reach materially different conclusions. The claim that AI-driven layoffs will be widely reversed is a prediction, not an established outcome. Readers weighing career or workforce decisions should consult multiple independent sources and treat single-vendor or single-forecast figures as indicative rather than definitive. For a practical view of the tools driving these shifts, see this overview of AI automation tools.
This article draws on a published interview that was edited for clarity and brevity.
