AI does not replace people, it replaces tasks. Companies, HR departments and public authorities still need to make AI a lever for training and transmission.
By Nicolas Doucerain, CEO of Valumen — Professor at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines
It is eight o’clock in the amphitheater of the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. The look of my first year PPEI (Personal Study and Integration Project) students betrays a dull anxiety. They must express their main fear. The answer is often unanimous: “artificial intelligence”. Or more precisely, what it will do with their jobs, their trajectories, their place in the world.
These students are not fragile or naive. They look at the world as it is presented to them, bombarded with a continuous flow of anxiety-inducing headlines, alarmist reports, massive layoffs announced with great fanfare by companies that brandish AI as a standard of modernity. A study by the Stanford Digital Economy Lab from November 2025 puts the relative decline in employment of 22-25 year olds in professions most exposed to AI at around 16% in the United States since the arrival of generative AI. INSEE, for its part, noted in France in the last quarter of 2025 a drop in employment of those under 30 in several sectors whose activity nevertheless continues to progress. Not to mention the highly publicized speeches of certain major tech figures, such as Bill Gateswhich recently mentioned the disappearance of 90% of jobs over the next twenty years.
Remove the doubt
In many companies, AI fulfills the basic tasks that juniors traditionally perform in their learning phase. So yes, our young people are petrified. Who could blame them?
At the risk of offending a few well-established egos in their management committees, we are missing something essential: AI is not the problem, the problem is what we do with it — or rather what we say about it. Too many companies have transformed the deployment of AI into a performance communication operation, forgetting that behind each automated process, there is a human being who wonders if it still has its place. Too many HR managers have let their teams discover their company’s AI strategy in the press, between two announcements of social plans.
AI does not replace men and women — it replaces tasks. Fundamental nuance because, if AI can analyze ten thousand resume in a matter of seconds, she can’t look a candidate in the eye and sense that they’re lying. She can generate a financial report in a few minutes, she cannot sense the toxic dynamics of a CODIR in crisis. She can optimize a schedule, she cannot motivate an exhausted team on a Monday in January.
Take back control of this story
As a business leader, I call on all economic players and the political world not to rush headlong, like a bee naturally attracted to its own honey. We must precisely do the opposite of this instinctive reflex: take a step back, tame the tool to better understand its strengths, but also measure its limits and risks. It is on this condition that we will be able to define, with discernment, where AI should start… and especially where it should stop in each function of the company.
It is not a question of running away from it, but of integrating it massively and intelligently to automate only the tasks that need to be automated and free up time. Time for what will never be replaceable: human relationships, intuition, creativitymanagerial courage. In short, time for women and men, who must remain the primary capital of every company in our country.
The companies that will capitalize best with AI will not be those that have automated the most. They will be those who know how to reinvest the time saved in what no machine can do: build solid corporate cultures, develop talents, manage with humanity, build loyalty through meaning. AI as a lever for humanization — that’s the real subject. This is the revolution we don’t hear enough about.
So what do we do: we continue to let a generation convince itself that it is doomed, to announce job cuts without ever explaining the retraining, the new skills, the new professions that are emerging?
Our decision-makers Politicians must become aware of the issue: professional training in the era of AI cannot remain a second-rate project. Managers and HR managers are also on the front line, their role has never been so strategic because we do not have the right to sacrifice a generation on the altar of performance.
It’s time to say it. Strong. And to assume it.
Nicolas Doucerain is CEO of Valumen, an HR and Executive Search consultancy firm, ranked for 5 consecutive years in the TOP 400 of Growth Champions — Les Échos. He teaches at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. Author of “Ma small business experienced the crisis” (Bourin Editeur)
