ADP chief says AI job debate should focus on tasks, not roles

ADP CEO Maria Black says companies should examine how artificial intelligence changes specific tasks rather than frame the shift as whole jobs disappearing. Her view matters because ADP handles payroll data covering one in six U.S. workers, giving the company a current view of labor-market changes, according to Fortune.

Black told Fortune’s Diane Brady that the standard monthly jobs report looks backward, while ADP’s payroll information gives a more immediate read on employment. Fortune reported that ADP and the Stanford Digital Economy Lab this month introduced a public tracker called the Canaries Dashboard, designed to show how employment is changing in occupations exposed to AI.

According to Fortune, the dashboard shows as many as 16% fewer jobs in AI-exposed sectors, including software development, since 2022. It also shows fewer jobs for workers ages 22 to 25, Fortune reported.

Black’s response is to push managers to break roles into smaller pieces. She told Fortune that companies should separate a job into its component tasks, connect wages to those tasks and use that analysis to guide reskilling and changing roles.

That approach shifts the focus from whether a position survives to which parts of the work create value, according to Black. Fortune reported that she sees task-level analysis as a way to prepare for role convergence, in which employees may need to combine duties that once sat in separate jobs.

Black is three and a half years into her tenure as ADP’s first female chief executive, according to Fortune. She joined the company in sales in 1997 and now leads a workforce of 67,000 employees, Fortune reported.

Her management advice centers on employees closest to the work. Black told Fortune that transformation has to start at the front lines rather than run only as an executive-led program, and she described culture as especially important during periods of innovation and change.

Black also cautioned executives against treating automation as the answer to every process. She told Fortune that AI can sound confident without having human judgment, context or perspective, and said leaders should decide carefully which tasks should be automated.

Fortune reported that Black was ranked No. 1 on Comparably’s 2025 list of top CEOs. ADP also appears on Fortune lists including Sector Leaders, World’s Most Admired Companies and America’s Most Innovative Companies, according to Fortune.

Black’s comments place ADP among employers using their own workforce and data to assess AI’s impact in real time. Her argument, as reported by Fortune, is that the next phase of workforce planning depends less on predicting which job titles vanish and more on identifying which tasks people, machines or both should handle.

This story draws on original reporting from Fortune.