What can we make of all the predictions on the future of work? Mainly because they are not all focused on the same variables and do not all reach the same conclusion. Let me illustrate.
Microsoft released its report – The New Future of Work, in December 2024. This is not the first year of this report. It began during the pandemic when we needed to understand better how remote work would impact professions. The report evolved to address hybrid work environments. Given the big questions that generative AI is asking of all of us, this year, the report has focused on the impact of generative AI. The report tackles many broad areas of the impact of AI – Productivity and work, Prompting and Interactions, Thinking and Learning, Appropriate Reliance, User Experience, Agents and Society and Culture. I had many interesting observations while reading this report. There are broad signs of productivity gains from gen AI (some role-specific), but long-term impacts may be modest until we can restructure work. As the authors suggest, we must shift how we work and create new types of work.
The World Economic Forum released its The Future of Jobs Report 2025 a month later. This report looks at broader variables such as macroeconomic conditions, the impact of climate change, geopolitical tensions, demographic shifts, and Digital and AI. The study finds that “workers can expect that two-fifths (39%) of their existing skill sets will be transformed or become outdated over the 2025-2030 period.” Interestingly, this number has declined over the past years. Employers seemed to suggest that the change in skills precipitated by the pandemic is well in motion, and we are reaching a new equilibrium. However, if we believe the findings from the MSFT report, we should see new types of work and a shift in how we work that will transform upskilling and reskilling.
Last summer, Professor Mari Sako, Professor of Management Studies at the Saiid Business School University of Oxford, organized a roundtable where she brought together multi-disciplinary experts across academia, policy, and practice to discuss the future of professionals. I had the privilege to participate in this roundtable. There seemed to be broad agreement that change is coming, that it must be more than productivity, and that we must design new workflows with humans in the loop. Unsurprisingly, even in a professional setting, opinions ranged widely on how quickly the change would come and to what parts of the work.
So, will we see widespread shifts in how we work, or are the effects more muted until we determine how we work and create new types of work? Interestingly, half the experts in a study envisioned that robots and digital agents would have displaced many blue- and white-collar workers, leading to income inequality and an unemployable population breakdown in the social order. This prediction for 2025 was made in an August 2014 report published by the Pew Research Center.
What future should we plan for? My opinion is:
- Change is inevitable. You should embrace it rather than be unable to.
- Not every part of the organization will be impacted in the same way. Prioritize where it matters immediately.
- Consider humans in the loop for the most critical processes. The technology is not ready for automated bots that deal with sensitive data.
- As gen AI technology matures, new AI-based capabilities and workflows will be developed.
Two areas that we should all be watchful of. The MSFT NFW report highlights that Generative AI tools can homogenize output if not carefully designed. We all bring our unique perspectives and creative energy to our work, and if we begin accepting gen AI outputs, we can converge on homogenous solutions. The second is that if users fall into the habit of accepting work rather than exercising the cognitive skills required to produce it, these skills will likely be forgotten. The speed and scale of knowledge work may increase in the short term and may come at the risk of creative and evaluative skill erosion. This erosion is concerning because Kartik Hosanagar et al. find that human participation in the most creative parts of work is critical for quality, satisfaction, and creative diversity. Here is Kartik’s post on Substack – Human exclusion from creative tasks worsens quality and worker satisfaction: new research study. As they conclude, ultimately, understanding how to balance human ingenuity with machine efficiency is not just a technological challenge but a profound design question for the future of work.
All this is to say that much needs to be figured out in the coming months and years.
