Senior IT leaders that frame internal AI-and-jobs communications at the job level ('will AI replace your role?') produce defensive postures from employees, lower reskill take-up, and the under-budgeted reskill line AM-109 documents. The task-level frame — which tasks shift on which horizon, which moats hold, which residual skills (agent output review, exception escalation routing, prompt and policy maintenance, vendor evaluation) the surviving role requires — is both more honest about what workers see at their desks and the only frame that resolves into the four skill gaps determining whether the post-displacement function actually works. The operational move for CIOs in 2026-2027 is to replace function-wide reassurance with task-level analytical resources teams can engage with directly, and to use those resources as the basis for role-by-role conversations rather than function-wide town halls. The task-level conversation should run before the reskill budget conversation, because the task inventory is the input the budget line needs.

Claim is scoped to enterprises mid-cycle on agentic-AI rollouts where workforce communications are a CHRO/CIO joint responsibility. The mid-market and lower-large-enterprise sub-cohort (200-2,000 person functions, single-digit named agent deployments in production, no dedicated AI workforce-transformation function) is the most exposed to the communications-failure pattern because the function-wide town hall is the default format in that cohort. 75-day review cadence is calibrated to land before the WEF Future of Jobs and Stanford HAI AI Index annual refresh windows. Originally reserved as AM-160 on 2026-05-20 in worktree `hungry-mcclintock-61ea8d`; renumbered to AM-161 when AM-160 was claimed in parallel by the Karpathy/Anthropic ship from `goofy-nobel-bc0135` (merged 2026-05-19 via PR #14, before this branch was rebased). Trigger conditions for status changes: (1) WEF Future of Jobs 2027 (next edition, due Q1 2027) reporting that the 39% core-skill-shift figure has narrowed materially below 30% by 2030 (would weaken the load-bearing premise that task-level is the unit of change and move toward Partial); (2) the first published enterprise case study reporting retraining-cycle-completion metrics segmented by upstream communications frame (would harden the claim if directional, refine it if the gap is smaller than the public HR case material currently suggests); (3) a large-employer programme running job-level communications at scale and disclosing retention and reskill take-up rates materially above the public case-material baseline (would move toward Partial because the job-level frame has demonstrated a counter-case); (4) the first published Microsoft, Anthropic, or OpenAI workforce-research output documenting the task-level versus job-level split with longitudinal data rather than cross-sectional snapshots (would tighten the claim's specificity).