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.
Demand for coders has collapsed. Up until this year, programming has been considered one of the most secure, predictable, and lucrative career options. But now, we're seeing reports that employment for programmers has collapsed to its lowest level since 1980. On the surface, the connection is obvious. AI agents are able to write code and do so much faster and cheaper than professional programmers. Code is structured text, something AIs are particularly well-suited to understand and reproduce.
Professional services-lawyers, accountants, management consultants like myself-the ones who actually process, analyze, and deal with a lot of data, those are the skills that can be replaced by AI and agentic AI," said Anne Lim O'Brien, vice chair, partner, and global co-leader of the consumer products sector at executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles.
Marketing agencies are in a period of transformation, thanks in part to AI, and they're using the opportunity to think about purposeful reinvention, according to a survey of agency leaders. The report, " AI's Effect On The Marketing Industry" (registration required), from Sunup found AI is already responsible for changes in the hiring practices of many agencies. Agencies are fundamentally rethinking what they offer clients, how they structure their teams and what skills the marketer of 2030 will need to succeed, according to the report.
Truly unlocking the value of AI is about more than new technology; it's about leadership. Now that artificial intelligence is giving employees back hours of time every day, organizations must help their workers reimagine their roles beyond routine output and start contributing in ways that AI can't.
