Your EVP Doesn't Need an AI Strategy. It Needs Honesty About What AI Is Actually Changing.

I have a concern about EVPs right now. And I think it's worth flagging before it becomes a bigger problem.

As companies refresh or build their EVPs in 2026, there's a real temptation to bolt "AI-forward culture" onto the proposition like a badge of honour. And I get it - AI is reshaping work, candidates are asking about it, and nobody wants to look like they're behind the curve. But my worry is that we're about to repeat a pattern we've seen before. Adding "We embrace AI" to your EVP is the 2026 version of adding "We value innovation" in 2015. It felt progressive at the time. It meant nothing then, and it'll mean nothing now - unless you can get genuinely specific about what it looks like.

This isn't a criticism of anyone's work. EVP is hard at the best of times, and nobody has the AI piece fully figured out yet. But that's exactly why it's worth talking about now, before vague AI messaging becomes the default.

Why Vague AI Messaging Won't Cut It

Deloitte's 2025 Global Human Capital Trends report introduced the concept of a "Human Value Proposition" for the AI age - the idea that your EVP needs to account for how AI is reshaping the day-to-day reality of work. They found that over 70% of workers are more likely to join and stay with an organisation whose EVP helps them thrive in an AI-driven world.

That's a significant number. But "helps them thrive" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. It doesn't mean adding a line about AI to your careers page. It means being able to answer a genuinely simple question - "what does AI actually change about working here?"

And that's where it gets bloody difficult. Most organisations are still figuring out what AI means for them - not just operationally, but financially and culturally too. Operationally, they haven't fully mapped which roles are being augmented, which are being restructured, which are being removed, and which might look very different in eighteen months.

Financially, budgets are shifting from headcount to tooling in ways that change what "investment in our people" actually means.

And culturally, the introduction of AI is quietly reshaping team dynamics, expectations around productivity, and what "good work" even looks like.

All three are tangled together - you can't update your EVP on one without understanding the other two. That's understandable - this stuff is moving fast. But if you're building or refreshing an EVP right now, you need to resist the urge to paper over that uncertainty with confident-sounding AI messaging that doesn't say anything concrete.

Because candidates can tell. Just like they can tell when "collaborative culture" means open-plan offices with no quiet spaces, they'll be able to tell when "AI-forward" means "we bought some licences and made a LinkedIn post about it."

The Questions Worth Sitting With

Investors are predicting that 2026 is the year AI moves from copilot to actively reshaping labour in certain sectors. Company budgets are shifting. This isn't theoretical anymore - it's happening in real time.

So if you're working on your culture and EVP, here are the questions I'd encourage you to sit with before you write a single word about AI:

Which roles are genuinely changing - and how? Not "all of them" - that's too broad to be useful. Your marketing team might be using AI for first drafts. Your data team might be automating reporting. Your customer service team might be handling 40% fewer tier-one queries. The specifics matter, because that's what candidates actually want to know.

What are you investing in to help people adapt? If AI is changing what people do, what support exists? Is there a real reskilling program, or just a LinkedIn Learning login nobody uses? Are managers equipped to have conversations about role evolution, or are they winging it? Being honest about where you are - even if it's early days - is far more credible than overpromising.

What happens to people whose work is automated? This is the question most of us find hardest to answer. But it's the one that matters most to the people inside your organisation, and considering it from the outside. Are you redeploying people? Offering transition support? Letting people go? Being upfront about what you don't know yet? An honest EVP in the AI age means being willing to address the uncomfortable questions, not just the exciting ones. In fact, I'd argue that the former is considerably more important than the latter.

What does AI actually feel like day-to-day? Is it liberating people from tedious work, or creating new anxieties about relevance? Are teams excited, cautious, or somewhere in between? The lived experience matters far more than the corporate narrative/spin.

What Good Looks Like

As Employer Branding News argued recently, EVPs in 2026 need to move from broad promises to demonstrable impact. That applies to AI more than anything else.

Instead of "We embrace AI," imagine something specific enough that a candidate can actually picture what it means:

"Our customer success team uses AI to handle routine queries, which means our people spend more time on complex problem-solving. We retrained everyone over six months. Some people loved it. Some found it difficult. We supported both."

That's not glamorous. It's not a badge. But it's real. And real is what helps the right people say yes - and the wrong people decide it's not for them. Which is exactly what a good EVP should do, right?

The Honest Bit

None of this is easy. And I want to be clear - I'm not suggesting anyone has this nailed, myself included. We're all navigating new territory. There's genuine tension between being honest about uncertainty and sounding like you have no plan at all.

But people don't expect you to have it all figured out. They expect you to be honest about where you are. An EVP that says "We're working this out, and here's how we're looking after people while we do" is infinitely more compelling than one that pretends everything is sorted.

Your EVP doesn't need an AI strategy. It needs the courage to tell the truth about what AI is actually changing - and what you're doing about it. Even if the honest answer is "we're still figuring it out."