Beyond Lip Service: Why SPINE Must Anchor DEI in AI-Driven Workforce Planning

The McKinsey article, “The Critical Role of Strategic Workforce Planning in the Age of AI” (February 2025), powerfully underscores a clear imperative: organizations must proactively reshape their workforces as artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes the nature of work itself. Yet in the chorus of technocratic strategy, one critical note is consistently left out: diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is not a luxury, a checkbox, or a liability — it is the core operating logic of ethical and sustainable AI workforce transformation.

To ignore DEI in the age of algorithmic acceleration is to misdiagnose the real defect. The flaw isn’t DEI — it’s exclusion, magnified by automation, embedded in biased datasets, and scaled by unchecked AI logic. As DEI practitioners, we must confront the persistent FLAW — Faulty Logic At Work — and insist on a systemic, integrated response: the SPINE Framework.

DEI: The Strategic Imperative, Not the Defect

Framing DEI as a “defect” implies there is something inherently problematic about inclusive representation and justice. But the data — and lived experience — tell us the opposite. The actual defect is systemic exclusion: historical inequities embedded in hiring, promotion, pay, and leadership access that…