A recent prediction from Gartner should give every board in Malta pause.

By 2029, Gartner expects that 30% of employees laid off because AI replaced them will need to be rehired, often at a significantly higher cost.

The reasoning is simple. Workforce cuts may deliver short-term savings, but they deplete talent pipelines and erode institutional knowledge. With labour-force growth flat or declining in much of the world, the people let go will be harder to replace, and recruitment, training and onboarding will all cost more.

“Their greatest mistake was believing that work automation was the point, when workforce amplification was the opportunity.”

That is how Gartner’s Tori Paulman expects executives to look back on the early AI era.

We agree. It is the premise on which ThinkPeople Nexus was built.

The cost no spreadsheet shows

Rehiring is only the visible part of the bill.

The larger loss is harder to see. It is the judgement that left with the people who went. The knowledge of why a process works the way it does. The supervisor who knew which client relationships needed care. The junior employee who would have become the next manager.

Gartner’s guidance for CHROs names these risks plainly: skill atrophy, restrained entry-level hiring, disrupted succession pipelines, excessive layoffs and cultural atrophy. It also warns that deploying AI to an unprepared workforce squanders investment and stalls adoption.

In a labour market the size of Malta and Gozo’s, these risks are sharper. The talent pool is finite. Sectors compete for the same profiles. The person released today is often the person a competitor hires tomorrow, or the person an organisation tries to win back at a premium next year.

Cut too deep, and you do not simply reduce cost. You lose capacity that a small economy cannot quickly rebuild.

Four shifts, one question

Gartner’s 2026 Hype Cycle for the Future of Work sets out four shifts. Read together, they ask a single question: who remains in charge of judgement?

  • 01Expand human capability through the human–AI relationship, using AI to strengthen judgement, creativity, leadership and decision-making while preserving accountability.
  • 02Build a workforce that adapts, not just adopts: people who continuously learn, collaborate across disciplines and thrive in more fluid roles.
  • 03Deepen context, judgement and meaning, so that people understand not only how a process is performed, but why.
  • 04Build a foundation for compound value, reinvesting AI productivity gains into innovation, modernisation and upskilling.

On the fourth, Gartner is direct. By 2027, it expects 75% of organisations that bank AI productivity gains mainly as cost savings to be eclipsed by competitors that reinvest them.

All four shifts lead to the same place. AI creates lasting value when people stay in charge of judgement, and when organisations deliberately rebuild capability around new ways of working.

We call this human stewardship. For us, it is an operating doctrine, not an ethical label.

From headcount to capability

Gartner’s answer is a “talent remix”: using AI to reshape roles and redirect people from less productive work towards new opportunities.

But a remix only works if you know what you are remixing. Most organisations cannot yet answer three basic questions with confidence.

What capability do we actually have, including the strengths that never appear in a job title?

Where is the market moving, and which of our roles sit closest to the skills it now demands?

What is the shortest credible route from where each person is today to where the organisation needs them to be?

Without those answers, a layoff looks like the only lever. With them, leaders can see others: redeployment, role redesign, targeted upskilling and internal mobility.

This is the work of ThinkPeople Nexus Skilling Pathways, one service we build, deliver and steward.

  • BuildWe map roles and skills, including hidden strengths, against evidence of advertised demand across Malta and Gozo and the European ESCO skills framework, creating skills maps and realistic pathways between roles.
  • DeliverWe bring together the right learning for each pathway: hybrid cohort learning through TPN Academia in Malta and Gozo, online learning and career routes, local qualifications and available funding. The method is platform-agnostic, and the organisation keeps strategic ownership.
  • StewardWe verify that new capability is applied in real work, not simply that a course was completed, keep pathways current as roles change, and measure value against the organisation’s own data.

That last step matters. Gartner advises leaders to monitor engagement, turnover in AI-impacted roles, workforce skill levels and the quality of AI-assisted work. These are the signals that show whether AI is amplifying a workforce or quietly hollowing it out.

Five questions for boards

Before approving the next AI-driven restructuring, every board and executive team might ask:

  1. Which roles are we redesigning, and which are we removing? Do we know the difference?
  2. What knowledge leaves with the people we let go, and who will hold it next?
  3. Have we mapped redeployment routes before choosing redundancy?
  4. Are we reinvesting AI productivity gains in capability, or booking them only as savings?
  5. Who is accountable for human judgement in the workflows AI now touches?

If these questions are hard to answer, that is itself the most useful finding. It means the decision to cut is being made without the evidence needed to make it well.

The choice in front of us

AI will change almost every role in Maltese organisations. That is not in question.

What is in question is whether leaders treat this moment as an opportunity to shrink, or an opportunity to grow capability.

Organisations that cut first and learn later will pay twice: once in lost knowledge, and again to rehire it.

Organisations that amplify will build something far harder to copy: a workforce that understands its own work, uses AI with judgement, and keeps getting better at both.

Rehiring is the most expensive way to discover what your people were worth.

There is a better way to find out.

Jesmond Saliba
ThinkPeople Nexus

Sources: Gartner, “Gartner Identifies 4 Shifts Shaping the Future of Work”, press release, 9 September 2026; Gartner, “Lay the Talent Groundwork for AI Success”, 27 July 2026. Quotations and predictions are Gartner’s; the perspective is ThinkPeople Nexus’s own.