When Siemens needed to market a new children’s hearing aid, the company turned to talent at Disney for their expertise in kids marketing. When Boeing designed and built its new 787 jet, it turned to its suppliers’ talent to get the job done. And one group of researchers turned to video gamers to solve the riddle of an AIDS enzyme.

In the case of the video gamers, researchers used the video game Foldit to create a puzzle that allowed video gamers find the solution to the enzyme.

These are examples of jobs being deconstructed and boundaries broken to get the right talent that were cited by John Boudreau in the first keynote at the CWS Summit for staffing buyers in Las Vegas on Monday. Boudreau is a professor and research director at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and Center for Effective Organizations. His talk was entitled “Thriving in a new normal; boundary-less organizational forms and alternative work arrangements beyond employment.”

Boudreau focused on deconstructing work to find the component parts, breaking boundaries in order to locate the best talent for the tasks and then getting creative about rewarding those involved.

In the AIDS enzyme case, researchers deconstructed the job and found a math problem, not a biological problem, Boudreau said. Then they broke the boundaries and went to the video gamers. And they got creative about rewards. The video gamers weren’t rewarded, but they got bragging rights for the high score.

As the workplace evolves, Boudreau said new systems must be created to harness the right talent to get the necessary work done.

“We need systems that at least pose the possibility there may be another way to get jobs done,” he said.

Boudreau also weighed in on the debate over whether artificial intelligence (AI) and robots will take over jobs. While some in human resources may see their jobs in the future as helping people replaced by robots, it may be that both robots and humans coexist. It doesn’t need to be an “either or” proposition, humans and robots may work together. One example Boudreau cited: AI working with medical researchers to fight disease.

“The interesting places are no the either/or,” he said. “Interesting places are the hybrids, where people and technology are combined.”

The CWS conference is set to continue through today. On Wednesday, the Collaboration in the Gig Economy conference begins, bringing together staffing buyers, vendor management systems, managed service providers, staffing firms and human cloud firms.