"We now recognize this general purpose technology we call intelligence as an opportunity to create new industries, create brand new jobs. But of course, it will shape every job. Some will no longer be necessary. Many new ones will be invented beyond our imagination today."
If you sell the tool, you're in a race against the model. But if you sell the work, every improvement in the model makes your service faster, cheaper, and harder to compete with. A company might spend $10K a year for QuickBooks and $120K on an accountant to close the books. The next legendary company will just close the books.
Companies aren't rewarded for making decisions that support people or social goods. Companies are rewarded for profit. They're rewarded for being first to market. When robotics cuts labor costs or increases output, deployment becomes a business decision. Whether displaced workers are retrained or supported elsewhere depends on public policy.
The linear career path changed somewhere between the rise of the gig economy and the rise of artificial intelligence. Companies are restructuring. Some industries may collapse entirely in the next five years. I've gone from studying law to studying software entrepreneurship to being a self-improvement essayist. My career is still an "experiment in progress." The world of work is changing. And I'm changing with it.
We talk constantly about age-in politics, in leadership, in debates about retirement and the future of work. Yet we rarely stop to ask a simple question: What is age, exactly? Most of us rely on a single number, as if people were stamped with a vintage year like bottles of wine. But age is far from a fixed or universal metric. It is multidimensional, deeply unequal, and increasingly misleading when used as a shortcut for ability, potential, or readiness.
In September, the consulting firm Accenture made headlines when it acknowledged it had "exited" 11,000 employees who couldn't be retrained to adapt to AI. On a recent earnings call, CEO Julie Sweet explained the decision bluntly, saying that "the workforce needs new skills to use AI, and new talent strategies and related competencies must be developed." It's a tough-but-true reality that thanks to AI, tomorrow's jobs will look radically different than they do today.
Aki Ito is our chief correspondent on careers, a huge topic for Davos - and for us. She asked people across business tough questions about the future of work (believe me, I was in the room) to help bring insights for your success. She also moderated a conversation with chief people officers from companies across the business world. You'll see her takeaways from that soon.
Kate Lister is a widely recognized thought leader on trends that are changing the who, what, when, where, why, and how of work. As the founder of Global Workplace Analytics, she has been helping organizations understand, pilot, scale, and optimize their workplace strategies and work practices for nearly two decades. Kate was one of only three witnesses invited to testify before a U.S. Senate committee regarding the post-pandemic potential for distributed work in government.
