Workplace – Oliver Pickup

Go Flux Yourself: Navigating the Future of Work (No. 3)

TL;DR: March’s Go Flux Yourself is full of heart (rather than brains and muscles), discusses the “relationship economy”, off-field Manchester City stories, and tips to prepare the leaders of tomorrow …

Image created on Midjourney with the prompt “a hyperrealistic pep guardiola with a big heart on his Manchester City shirt handing out lemon shortbread to a female cleaner after a game”

The future

“In the past, jobs were about muscle; now they’re about brains; but in the future, they’ll be about the heart.”

I love these words of wisdom from Minouche Shafik, the incumbent President of Colombia University.

I heard them for the first time a couple of days ago, at LinkedIn’s Talent Connect conference in east London. On stage, delivering the closing keynote, was Aneesh Raman, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama during his time in the White House. Now, he is VP and Workforce Expert at the professional social media platform, which reached one billion members last year.

Raman talked about the need for more, well, heart in the age of artificial intelligence. And he argued, convincingly, that the human role and capabilities in this epoch should be imagined from a place of possibility, not fear.

He promoted the concept of the “relationship economy”, which will supersede the “knowledge economy”. While the latter is fuelled by the Internet, the former will be anchored on expanding human social and emotional capabilities.

Here, HR professionals have a pivotal role to play. They have the power to bring more humanity to work – paradoxically by using technology – and therefore spread more humanity, or heart, to the physical (and digital) world. At the moment, due to the almighty buzz around AI, “humans seem to have become an afterthought”, Raman posited.

My work wanderings this last month have revolved around AI-augmented jobs, skill-based recruitment, and future roles. I wrote my inaugural column for UKTN on a related topic. The headline was “£1.1bn to upskill the UK for future tech roles is too little too late”, and I didn’t hold back.

“In ordinary circumstances, a figure of £1.1bn – the headline-capturing amount the government announced last week to train ‘over 4,000’ UK students in future technologies – wouldn’t be lamentable,” I started. “Yet, considering total public spending on education was £116bn in 2022-23, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies – down 8% from the 2010-11 figure – it smacks of a weak attempt to win some media coverage and votes in the looming general election.”

I cited an Axios study – published on the exact day Science and Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan announced the £1.1bn package to skill-up the UK in future tech roles – that found only 18% of UK workers believe that AI has improved productivity. Of the 17 countries polled, at the other end of the scale were India (67%), Indonesia (65%), and the UAE (62%).

Certainly, AI literacy is a hot topic, with frontrunners arguing leaders need to set the example, and support such learning and education across their organisations. Raman stated that 44% of UK companies are currently helping employees become AI literate – at the top was India, with 52%.

Earlier in March, I attended a Workday roundtable titled “Leveraging AI to Foster Skills and Inclusivity”. I have a vested interest in the future of work, not least because I’m the father of two young children. I explained to the panellists that I think the current school curriculum is unsuitable for tomorrow’s workers and asked how I should best prepare them.

My thinking on this subject has long been based on the so-called 4 Cs of 21st-century learning: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. All four involve the heart Shafik is talking about. And they are why I’m pleased my son plays rugby – team sport is excellent for developing all four Cs. It’s also good for shared winning and losing experiences, which can be clouded in the digital age, and warped by social media – more on this below.

The Workday roundtable panellists shared my concern that today’s schooling is unfit for tomorrow. Yet they offered some useful extracurricular tips. For instance, Michael Houlihan, CEO of Generation UK and Ireland, which recruits, trains, and places unemployed young adults into career-launching jobs, suggested using generative AI tools to engage kids, such as having them interact with characters from their favourite books. This can turn a “spark” of interest into a “raging fire of learning and passion”.

He argued that exposing kids to technology and getting them comfortable with it through play at a young age is essential. Online learning tools and platforms, like Khan Academy, are creating exciting generative AI tools to help teach kids subjects like maths in an engaging, interactive way.

I was heartened by these answers, and Shafik’s quotation supported this movement toward the “relationship economy” – one accessed through technology but with humanity at its beating centre.

The present

I enjoy ghostwriting thought leadership articles for various executives – pinching expert opinions and inhabiting their psyche is like being an actor on the stage – and last week, I spoke with a Dutch consultant about geopolitical tensions. Refreshingly, he would not be led by my rather gloomy narrative.

He countered that, despite what one might see and hear in the media, humanity is in a relatively safe period. The reason most of us are more prone to doom-mongering is down to social media, which amplifies everything and causes collective anxiety to rocket, he posited.

While what’s happening in Ukraine and Gaza is horrific, and the climate crisis looms like a black cloud, undoubtedly, there is something in this hypothesis. How pleasing, then, that on Monday, Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill that will ban social media accounts for children under 14 and require parental permission for 14- and 15-year-olds. If – and it’s not a given, especially considering who might (re)enter the White House – it becomes law, it will take effect on January 1.

It’s somewhat out of character for former presidential candidate DeSantis. Indeed, during a 2022 rally in protest of the Supreme Court ruling that overturned the Roe versus Wade abortion ruling, Democratic State Senator Tina Polsky announced to the crowd of about 250 at the Esplanade in Downtown Fort Lauderdale that DeSantis couldn’t care less about – especially his wife and daughters. “He’s heartless,” she said.

Perhaps DeSantis has a heart, after all. But will other states – and countries – follow suit? With Father Christmas having gifted my eldest child a Nintendo Switch last Christmas, but a few years off finding a smartphone under the tree, I sincerely hope so.

Social media platforms are toxic for society and corroding young minds – and older ones. I’ve removed all social media apps – bar LinkedIn, which is useful for work – from my phone, and gone to the extreme of using a grayscale setting so that the display is less appealing (if you are thinking of doing this, be warned that it is a nightmare to locate Lime bike parking bays in central London).

Pep Guardiola, Manchester City’s manager, is someone else who has a heart. And I’m not writing that just because I’m a (long-standing) fan of the club (I was in Istanbul last June, cheering on at the triumphant Champions League final).

At the start of the month, I was fortunate to be invited by City’s technology partner, Qualtrics, to the Etihad Stadium for a tour and a roundtable on how the club uses data to improve the customer experience ahead of the Champions League match against FC Copenhagen.

There were some lovely snippets of information. In a stint in the US before joining City in 2016, Guardiola scanned American sports for tips. City’s circular changing room, for example, is lifted from the NFL. The words snaking around the ceiling read: “Some are born here, some are drawn here, and all call it home.” That sense of togetherness is central to the club’s success. But the manager plays his part, on and off the pitch – and in the backroom. It was revealed that after every home game, the Spaniard seeks out changing room cleaner, Deb, and says thanks with a lemon shortbread. Nice touch.

City’s customer experience team are trying to win hearts and minds. Thanks to its partnership with Qualtrics, the club uses data to understand its fans and improve their experience. The department is bringing data from various sources into one place to create a “single source of truth” and a 360-degree view of fans. This includes operational data from their CRM and experience data from surveys, social media, call centre interactions, and so on.

On match days, the team uses real-time data and feedback to identify and resolve issues like long queues. Post-match surveys help assess what’s working well versus what needs improvement across different fan segments. It serves as another example of how the muscle and brain of AI can combine with the human heart to provide a superior experience.

The past

Ian Lees was the 64-year-old tour guide at the Etihad who told me about Pep’s lemon shortbread pressie for the cleaner. Ian has been at the club since 1976, was a first-team coach for a while, and was a font of knowledge – no AI will ever be able to replace passionate people like Ian.

He had so many incredible stories, but two stand out that show how peculiar – and sentimental, or superstitious – humans can be. John Stones, the rangy centre-back turned unlikely libero, apparently is a size 9 shoe, yet he wears size 8 football boots. Meanwhile, right-back and captain Kyle Walker’s winning goal in a game aged 14 had such an impact on him that he wears the same – and unwashed – shinpads today, 19 years later.

We all have quirks. That’s what makes us human. As I approach one year of sobriety – April 1 (no joke) will make it 12 months without booze – I shudder to recall some of the heartless and mindless things I’ve done in the past. Yet, reflecting on those drunk-fuelled missteps – and near-death experiences, as explored in a recent Upper Bottom podcast episode) – means the 2.0 version of me will be a better human.

Statistics of the month

Over half (55%) of IT leaders feel pressure from their organisation’s leadership to implement new AI technology, according to Asana’s Work Innovation Lab. Yet, a quarter regret investing in AI too quickly, showing that business pressure means AI implementation isn’t as thoughtful as it could be.
One in ten (10%) employees have witnessed or experienced sexual harassment at work in the UK, but nearly half (49%) of these did not report it, finds Personio.
Gartner research indicates only 46% of employees feel supported trying to grow their careers at their organisation.

Stay fluxed – and get in touch! Let’s get fluxed together …

Thank you for reading Go Flux Yourself. Subscribe for free to receive this monthly newsletter straight to your inbox.

All feedback is welcome, via oliver@pickup.media. If you enjoyed reading, please consider sharing it via social media or email. Thank you.

And if you are interested in my writing, speaking and strategising services, you can find me on LinkedIn or email me using oliver@pickup.media.

Go Flux Yourself: Navigating the Future of Work (No. 1)

TL;DR: This month’s Go Flux Yourself includes thinking like badgers, rogue chatbots, American presidents snogging, productivity problems, return-to-office mandates, and AI leaders admitting they don’t know “what happens next” – but not in that order …

Image created on Midjourney with the prompt “a Henri Bonnard-style painting set in the New Forest in England with badgers, remote workers, Joe Biden and Donald Trump kissing, and lonely males looking at their smartphones”

About this newsletter

A warm welcome to the first edition of a rude-sounding-yet-useful newsletter for business leaders striving to make sense of today and be better prepared for tomorrow.

Below is a summary of what I hope to offer with Go Flux Yourself (with luck, a memorably naughty pun on “flux”, meaning continuous change, in case it requires an explanation).

“Master change and disruption with Oliver Pickup’s monthly future-of-work newsletter: insights and stories on transformation, curated by an award-winning, future-of-work specialist.”

I’m a London-based technology and business communicator – I write, speak, strategise, moderate, listen, and learn – and you can find more about me and my work at www.oliverpickup.com.

At the end of every month, I serve up insights, statistics, quotations and observations from the fascinating and ever-changing future-of-work space in which I operate.

Every month, the Go Flux Yourself newsletter will have three sections:

The future – forward-looking, regarding challenges and opportunities.
The present – relevant news, eye-catching examples. glimpses of upcoming challenges and opportunities.
The past – lessons from yesterday that might help leaders tomorrow.

The most important thing is to get fluxed, and change. “He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils, for time is the greatest innovator,” wrote Francis Bacon almost 400 years ago (in 1625).

The future

“No one knows what happens next.” Especially badgers.

The above, rather alarmingly, is the sign/motto above Sam Altman’s desk (without the bit about badgers – more on them later), as revealed in a panel session, Technology in a Turbulent World, at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in snowy Davos.

It reeks of faux justification and diminished responsibility for possible humanity-damaging mistakes made by the co-founder and CEO of Microsoft-backed OpenAI, arguably the world’s most important company in 2024.

Fellow panellist Marc Benioff, chair and CEO of Salesforce, stated: “We don’t want to see an AI Hiroshima.” Indeed, “no one knows what happens next” echoes Facebook’s original – and poorly aged – mantra of “move fast and break things” that was adopted by Silicon Valley and the wider technology community. But at what cost? Can the capitalists curb their rapaciousness? Well, what’s to stop them, really? They can stomp on the paper tigers that currently stand against them. (I’m going to be writing and speaking about this more in February.)

The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, clarified his feelings at WEF and argued that every breakthrough in generative AI increases the threat of unintended consequences. “Powerful tech companies are already pursuing profits with a reckless disregard for human rights, personal privacy, and social impact,” said the Portuguese. But he strikes the same tone when talking about climate change, and his comments, again, are falling on seemingly deaf ears. Or at least greed for green – the paper kind – outweighs concerns for humanity.

A few days earlier, on January 9, Scott Galloway, professor at New York University Stern School of Business, and Inflection AI’s co-founder Mustafa Suleyman (former co-founder of DeepMind), asked: “Can AI be contained?”

Galloway pointed out that given there are over 70 elections around the globe in 2024 – the most in history – there is likely to be a “lollapalooza of misinformation”. And that was before the deepfake of Joe Biden snogging Donald Trump, which was on the front page of the Financial Times Weekend’s magazine on January 27 (see below).

The provocative American entrepreneur and educator also pointed out that AI will likely increase loneliness, with “searches for AI girlfriends off the charts”. How depressing. But the recent example of a Belgian man – married with two children – killing himself as his beloved chatbot convinced him to end his life for the sake of the planet is evidence enough.

In a similar vein, delivery firm DPD disabled part of its AI-powered online chatbot after it went rogue a couple of weeks ago. A customer struggling to track down his parcel decided to entertain himself with the chatbot facility. It told the user a joke, when prompted, served up profane replies, and created a haiku calling itself a “useless chatbot that can’t help you”. What would Alan Turing think?

Anyway, Galloway also noted how the brightest young minds are not attracted to government roles, and it’s a massive challenge (not least when top talent can earn much, much more at tech firms). (As an aside, I interviewed Prof G a couple of years ago for a piece on higher education, and he called me “full of sh1t”. Charming.)

Meanwhile, Suleyman discussed job destruction due to AI advancement. He predicted that in 30 years, we will be approaching “zero cost for basic goods”, and society will have moved beyond the need for universal basic income and towards “universal basic provision”.

How this Star Trek economy is funded is open to debate, and no one has a convincing solution, yet. (Although Jeremy Hunt, who was on the panel in Davos with Altman, Benioff, et al, might not be consulted. The chancellor revealed that his first question to ChatGPT was “is Jeremy Hunt a good chancellor?” The egoist queried the reply – “Jeremy Hunt is not chancellor” – without, even now, realising that ChatGPT’s training data stopped before his appointment.)

Further, the absence of trust in government – as per the latest Edelman Trust Barometer (which has the general population in the UK (39) and the US (46) well below half, and both down on the 2023 figures) – and increasing power of the tech giants could mean that the latter will act more like nation-states. And with that social contract effectively ripped up, and safety not assured, chaos could reign. Suleyman talked about the “plummeting cost of power”, and posited conflict can be expected if actual nation-states can no longer look after their citizens, digitally or physically. The theme of prioritising trust is a big one for me in 2024, and in January a lot of my writing and speaking has been founded upon this topic.

If “no one knows what happens next”, leaders must educate themselves to broaden their scope of understanding and be proactive to get fluxed. The words of 18th-century English historian Edward Gibbons come to mind: “The wind and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigator.”

Certainly, I’ve been busy educating myself, and have completed courses in generative AI, public speaking and podcasting, to help me achieve my 2024 goal of being more human in an increasingly digital age. This time next month, I’ll be able to share news about a (sobriety) podcast and also a thought-leadership business I’m launching in February.

The present

A couple of weeks ago, judge Robert Richter dealt a blow to those in the financial services industry – and possibly beyond – hoping to work fully remotely. He ruled against a senior manager at the Financial Conduct Authority who wanted to work from home full-time, finding the office was a better environment for “rapid discussion” and “non-verbal communication”.

The landmark case will have been closely watched by other employers considering return-to-office mandates. The judge found that the financial watchdog was within its rights to deny Elizabeth Wilson’s request, stating there were “weaknesses with remote working”. Poor Elizabeth; like badgers, all she wants is to be at home without disruption.

Judge Richter wrote in judgement: “It is the experience of many who work using technology that it is not well suited to the fast-paced interplay of exchanges which occur in, for example, planning meetings or training events when rapid discussion can occur on topics.

He also pointed to “a limitation to the ability to observe and respond to non-verbal communication which may arise outside of the context of formal events but which nonetheless forms an important part of working with other individuals”.

It will be interesting to see how this ruling impacts the financial services industry especially. It feels like a big blow to those operating in this area, and solidifies the notion that firms are rigidly not keeping up with the times. Will this trigger an exodus of top talent?

Leaders believe that productivity lies at the heart of the workplace debate – but should it? The old maxim that “a happy worker makes a productive worker” springs to mind. One comes before the other. With this in mind, I enjoyed participating in a roundtable hosted by Slack and Be the Business, atop the Gherkin in the city of London, that discussed how better communication delivers the most significant wins regarding productivity for small- to medium-sized businesses in the UK.

The session coincided with new research examining how SMBs can overcome stagnation in 2024. Of the many interesting findings, these were the most compelling for me: Poor management was the top internal barrier to growth, highlighted by over four in ten (45%). This was followed by: Poor communication and lack of collaboration (38%); Lack of motivation (36%); and Employee burnout (33%).

Clearly, whether working in the office or not, communication and collaboration go hand in hand, and these have to improve – for everyone’s sake, with the UK languishing at the bottom of the G7 productivity rankings.

As the roundtable chair, CEO of Be the Business Anthony Impey, noted, a 1% increase in the UK’s productivity will boost the economy by £95 billion over five years.

The past

Here come the badgers, finally.

This month, I enjoyed a weekend spa retreat in the New Forest, close to Lymington, where – ironically – the aforementioned Gibbons served as a member of parliament in the 1780s. I stayed five miles due north in Brockenhurst and enjoyed strolling in the countryside, marvelling at deer and wild horses. I was fascinated to learn the (alleged) etymology of Brockenhurst stems from the Celtic for “badger’s home” with the black-and-white nocturnal creatures having been common residents for centuries.

I was informed that the badgers have, over the years, built an underground tunnel that stretches from Brockenhurst to Lymington. Human attempts to block the way, and collapse the tunnel, have come to nought. The badgers are resilient and inventive, they will always dig around obstacles, and make new tunnels. It struck me that we should all be more like badgers.

Statistics of the month

Only 8% of European businesses have adopted AI, whereas the number is over 50% in the United States, according to Cecilia Bonefeld-Dahl, Director General of DIGITALEUROPE.
Cisco’s 2024 Data Privacy Benchmark Study shows more than one-quarter of organisations have banned the use of generative AI, highlighting the growing privacy concerns and the trust challenges facing organisations over their use of AI.
O.C. Tanner’s 2024 Global Culture Report revealed that less than half of UK leaders (47%) consider their employees when deciding to enact business-wide changes. And just 44% seek employee opinions as changes are rolled out.

Stay fluxed – and get in touch! Let’s get fluxed together …

Thank you for reading Go Flux Yourself. Subscribe for free to receive this monthly newsletter straight to your inbox.

All feedback is welcome, via oliver@pickup.media. If you enjoyed reading, please consider sharing it via social media or email. Thank you.

And if you are interested in my writing, speaking and strategising services, you can find me on LinkedIn or email me using oliver@pickup.media.

Is 5G the key to a truly digital society?

A panel of experts – including Vodafone UK, NatWest’s Boxed and Google – say asset tracking and optimising connected buildings and vehicles are some of the more encouraging 5G use cases, but we need better collaboration and storytelling to narrow the digital divide and create a truly digital society in the UK

Nick Gliddon, Vodafone UK’s director of business, argues that 5G is crucial to help both communities and businesses make swift and wide-ranging progress. Earlier this year, Vodafone research calculated that having a best-in-class 5G network in the UK would deliver up to £5 billion a year in economic benefit by 2030.

An additional study of 2,000 UK adults suggested Britons believe 5G can improve society more than AI. The survey found healthcare (31%), utilities like energy and water (21%), and railways (20%) were key sectors that will benefit most from 5G.

Empowering people is the beating heart of a digital society, and Gliddon says 5G can help this on five fronts. It will improve connectivity, video capabilities, business applications, immersive experiences, and digital-twin technology, which is a digital representation of a physical process, portrayed in a digital version of its environment.

As a digital society grows in the UK, there are also opportunities for businesses. “A truly digital society is one where individuals, platforms and utilities are seamlessly interconnected,” says Tom Bentley, head of growth at Boxed, NatWest’s banking-as-a-service platform. “Cloud and 5G technologies provide a better customer service experience where the fulfilment of product or utilities can be instant, compared with the existing physical processes of the past.” He adds that such service “fundamentally relies on quality data combined with strong interconnectivity”.

Ben Shimshon, co-founder and managing partner at Thinks, an insight and strategy consultancy, notes that some UK organisations – especially SMEs – are taking advantage of the opportunities opened up by better connectivity piecemeal, and often more slowly. “Some 99.4% of businesses in the UK have fewer than 50 employees, and three quarters of those are sole traders with no employees. A lot of them are doing predominantly offline things like scaffolding or running a shop,” he says. Many find the notion of a digital society “quite daunting”.

Clear business benefits

Part of the challenge is articulating the advantages of greater connectivity to time-pressed leaders of micro-businesses, not least because many are content with the status quo and incentives for digital adoption remain limited, says Bentley.

Still, those gaining digital access see clear benefits, Shimshon says, such as faster invoicing and payments to improve cash flow. Digital adoption happens gradually for many SMEs as new technologies like card readers are embraced, leading to incremental improvements across operations.

Matthew Evans, director for markets at the UK’s technology trade association techUK, argues that practical needs – like freeing up leisure time by streamlining admin – will resonate more with time-poor SME owners than abstract efficiency promises. “Think of that scaffolder who much prefers to watch his son playing football than doing his company accounts,” he says. “That needs to be the pitch: these digital tools will free up that time.”

Victoria Newton, chief product officer of Engine, Starling Bank’s software-as-a-service arm, agrees the focus should be on practically solving business problems rather than leading with technology. She highlights how Starling has transformed business banking by enabling round-the-clock digital financial services, through building a proprietary cloud-based banking infrastructure, Engine, from scratch. “Starling was able to do this, take our technology and imbed it within banks in countries starting that digital revolution themselves.”

Customer choice

As society becomes increasingly digital, though, the group acknowledged organisations must put citizens first. For example, Newton believes customer choice is paramount – some may opt for online self-service, but others still want human contact through banks, branches or contact centres. Top-down measures to increase digital capabilities risk excluding the most digitally disenfranchised without affordable options, she adds.

Another barrier to progress, says British Chambers of Commerce director Faye Busby, is that “people naturally don’t like change”. She highlights research, published in collaboration with Xero at the start of the year, showing that 75% of businesses believe their “broadband and general connectivity is very reliable”, suggesting they don’t realise what more connectivity could achieve for them. They underestimate the potential of a digital society.

Again, 5G has the power to electrify a digital society, but only once more people realise the good work that is going on. Several examples demonstrate 5G networks unleashing transformative applications, and most have been made possible thanks to visionary partners.

Gliddon calls Coventry “the most advanced 5G city in the UK”, partly because the city council, who have collaborated with Vodafone for almost a decade, is so progressive. The council gained smart-city capabilities by providing planning assistance to deploy 5G antennas rapidly, improving traffic flow, air quality monitoring and municipal operations. Coventry is creating a smart energy grid to better manage local renewable power generation by building on these digital foundations.

Coventry University is also the first in the UK to successfully deploy a 5G Standalone network. The forward-thinking council mandated 5G labs at Coventry University to support next-generation teaching in subjects like healthcare and engineering. Students can now access immersive learning through technologies like virtual reality.

For instance, healthcare students are using virtual reality and augmented reality to explore the human body like never before. Professors at the university use a headset and 5G allows them to access any part of the body during a lesson, making points and taking questions from students in real time, making the teaching experience much more flexible and interactive.

Elsewhere, for environmental services provider Veolia, 5G enables real-time asset tracking. Veolia’s head of digital strategy and innovations, Chris Burrows, outlines how sensors on the company’s recycling-collection trucks can ensure it takes 16.5 seconds – or fewer – to complete a bin empty, identify potholes, and build air-quality maps across cities.

CCTV cameras on Veolia’s trucks also use edge computing to pinpoint potential collisions, analysing footage instantly. “It effectively gives you a threat-to-life score,” he says. This facilitates rapid accident responses while providing evidence against false claims. Burrows emphasises that realising these benefits requires a supportive company culture and employees willing to act on data insights.

Meanwhile, techUK’s Evans lists encouraging 5G deployments in areas like ports and hospitals to manage assets and workforces. “The NHS wastes £300 million a year on medicine, at least half of which is avoidable, and is down to fridges breaking down, or drugs being left outside for too long. Better asset tracking would change that.”

Evans says, though, that if 5G is going to be successful and become “the digital fabric in the digital society”, there must be large-scale rollouts targeting enterprise use cases.

Daniel Peach, head of digital acceleration programmes at Google, predicts that greater 5G adoption will spur many new business models and opportunities. “It might seem minor, but there are a lot of buildings we don’t have data for,” he says. “There is a use case of energy optimisation and moving beyond motion sensors. If you track that centrally, you can entirely shut off parts of the building when it’s not in use. There is so much scope for innovation around connected buildings and connected vehicles.”

Cut the jargon

To accelerate the move to a digital society, there are a number of barriers to overcome. Gliddon stresses the need for appropriate language to explain digital innovation in an engaging, sector-specific way. This chimes with Busby, who believes unclear terminology, such as “connectivity”, remains a barrier, with many unable to grasp its meaning.

The energy demands of an increasingly data-driven society must be addressed. For Burrows, “digital sobriety” is needed regarding endless data storage and transfer. Peach expects 5G’s carbon impact to fall, being more efficient than 3G or 4G.

Finally, significant investment is required for the digital society – nationwide 5G coverage comes at a cost. Currently, telecoms operators are largely being asked to fund its deployment alone and forecasts suggest there is a hole of £25-30 billion if the industry is to meet Government expectations. This is one of the reasons why Vodafone and Three have announced plans to merge. If approved – a merged company would have the necessary scale to invest in creating one of Europe’s most advanced 5G networks. Vodafone says it would invest £11 billion in the network over the next decade and take 5G Standalone to 99% of populated areas by 2034.

Ultimately, while the core network technology promises significant performance improvements, realising technological potential requires careful human and organisational transformation. Joined-up thinking and greater collaboration between telcos, academia, the public and private sector, and telling compelling stories that persuade businesses to embrace digital innovation is vital to unleashing 5G’s possibilities and building an inclusive and sustainable digital society.

This article was first published by Raconteur, in November 2023, following an in-person roundtable event that I moderated

How artificial intelligence is making HR more human

HR teams are already using AI-based tech to communicate better with employees, improve career mobility inside their organisations and make well-timed authentic acknowledgements of people’s contributions

How many HR managers acknowledged Artificial Intelligence Appreciation Day on 16 July? It probably passed unnoticed by most, considering the ever-growing list of tasks demanding the profession’s attention.

Even if they did have a minute to look up from their work and appreciate the power of this fast-developing technology, is there any reason to celebrate something that’s likely to put millions of people out of a job?

‘Yes’ should be the answer to that question. AI’s ability to automate certain tasks and reduce administrative workloads promises to make the HR practitioner’s role more human. Embracing AI should free professionals in this space to devote more time and energy to identifying talent and nurturing it, which is why most people enter the field in the first place. And, with more and better information at its fingertips, the function could play a more holistic and strategically important role.

But have HR teams become too overloaded with extra work to take this great opportunity?

How HR’s role has expanded

During the Covid crisis, HR teams were “mostly in survival mode”, says Dr Aaron Taylor, head of Arden University’s School of Human Resource Management. “As well as figuring out how employees could work from home, they needed to provide extra support for their mental and physical wellbeing while adhering to health guidelines.”

Progressive organisations will start to broaden how they use generative AI and it will benefit both employees and HR teams

He points out that, thanks to shifting workforce trends, many HR leaders were involved in C-level decisions to keep companies functioning, as well as to handle restructuring operations and redundancy programmes.

“The profession’s evolution over the past 25 years – from ‘pay and rations’ to the strategic role it plays today – has, quite possibly, been more radical than that of any other business function,” Taylor argues.

Eric Mosley, co-founder and CEO of HR software firm Workhuman, agrees that HR has gone through “a very hectic, chaotic time. There’s been a complete whiplash, with trends veering from one direction to another.”

Outlining the chaotic nature of the Covid era, Mosley points to remote working, back-to-office mandates, quiet quitting, loud quitting, the great resignation and, as economic uncertainty prevails, the so-called big stay.

AI’s part in the future of HR

Helen Poitevin is a distinguished vice-president and analyst focusing on HR tech at research giant Gartner. She says that “a debate is raging about the future of work between ‘explorers’, who embrace new tech and ways of working, and ‘restorers’, who believe companies should be using tried and tested methods. AI has emerged as one of the disruptive technologies at the heart of this conversation.”

Poitevin reports that AI is already playing a role in HR operations ranging from policy-making to recruitment. A global survey of HR leaders published by Gartner in July indicates that 5% have implemented generative AI, for instance, while 9% are piloting its use.

“In the future, progressive organisations will start to broaden how they use generative AI. It will benefit both employees and HR teams,” she predicts. “A quarter of HR leaders are planning to use it to create hyper-personalised career development plans, for instance.”

Poitevin adds that HR professionals can, when equipped with the right tech, “better understand employees and so provide more human advice” that’s better tailored to each person’s needs.

Taylor agrees that the profession has been placing greater emphasis on understanding employees as people. “There is much more importance on the ‘human’ aspects of HR now, especially when looking at employee experience,” he says. “This is no longer solely about ensuring regulatory compliance. This is about going that extra mile to know what makes employees tick and how that aligns with the company’s overall strategy.”

Skills development and career progression

While it’s never exactly been strong, the quality of communications between HR and the shop floor has worsened in recent years. New research by data science consultancy Profusion indicates that only 24% of employees are “fully comfortable” discussing workplace problems with the HR team, for example.

Profusion’s CEO, Natalie Cramp, notes that the pandemic-induced shift towards remote working has “severely hampered the relationship between workers and their HR representatives, eroding any sense of trust and understanding”.

This is about going that extra mile to know what makes employees tick and how that aligns with the company’s overall strategy

A study published in May by Microsoft, which has invested heavily in generative AI, argues that HR practitioners who understand the technology and use it well will become better communicators with the power to improve the employee experience.

“Human-AI collaboration will be the next transformational work pattern,” the research report predicts, proposing the notion of using AI as a “co-pilot”.

How would such co-piloting work in practice? Take the use of so-called writer’s block AI to improve communications between HR and the workforce, for instance. This technology uses relevant information about the company and its employees to personalise messages and deliver these in the appropriate tone.

An HR team can work alongside AI to map out possible career paths for people in the organisation. For instance, the technology might spot hidden potential in an employee who’s been flying under the radar and prompt the team to alert that individual to an appealing internal role that would suit their talents and offer them a valuable development opportunity.

AI can enable better employee recognition

AI can also aid employee recognition – a wellbeing-boosting intervention that can be as simple as thanking someone publicly, yet is lacking in many workplaces. LinkedIn has reported achieving a 96% retention rate among employees whose work was acknowledged at least four times a year. With the prompting of AI, HR teams can recognise and celebrate the contributions (or life events) of employees or ask their line managers to do so.

“Recognition is an authentic, honest moment, where someone expresses genuine gratitude for another’s work,” Mosley says. “That connection can build relationships and community.”

He stresses that recognition has the greatest impact when it is “fulfilled, authentic, embedded in the culture, individualised and equitable”. Again, AI tools can help HR practitioners with all of this, enabling them to convey heartfelt messages of encouragement when it matters to the recipients.

Research by Workhuman suggests that giving recognition is mutually beneficial. Managers who have done so in the past two months are more likely than those who haven’t to love their jobs (75% versus 48%) and identify as highly engaged (89% versus 64%).

Building on this last data point, Gallup’s most recent State of the Global Workplace report pegged employee engagement at about 23% last year. Given that this was the highest recorded percentage since the company started gathering such data in 2009, there is clearly significant room for improvement.

Now, thanks to AI, HR teams have no excuse not to be more human in the digital era, recognise the good work of others and gain job satisfaction in the process.

This article was first published by Raconteur, as part of Future of HR special report in The Times, in July 2023

‘Anti-meaningless work’: How Gen Zers are redefining traditional career paths

Gen Zers are forcing employers to evolve their ways of working. And rather than lamenting today’s youth, older business leaders would be wise to accommodate the workforce’s youngest generation better.

Moving away from traditional career paths to encourage non-linear development makes sense for all parties in 2023. A new approach and fresh thinking are critical. “Logic will get you from A to B,” said Albert Einstein. “Imagination will take you everywhere.”

Events spurred by the coronavirus crisis have upended many norms. Still, it is arguably the Gen Z cohort that has suffered the most through disjointed education, severely limited early-career opportunities, and a lack of in-person work and play experiences, in addition to the psychological impact of Covid-19. Now, Gen Z is in the driving seat to propel meaningful change and usher in a new work paradigm.

“The last three years have enabled Gen Zers to reap the flexibility benefits of remote working with many more deciding to optimize for a lifestyle as a digital nomad,” said Charlie Rogers, a London-based executive team coordinator at The Portfolio Collective (a global community of more than 8,000 portfolio professionals) and founder of Mastery in Your 20s, a community platform to equip people in their third decade with the skills to take “their own pathless path.”

The full version of this article was first published on Digiday’s future-of-work platform, WorkLife, in June 2023 – to read the complete piece, please click HERE.

As great resignation trend slows, here’s how companies are enticing ex-employees back

There was muted celebration in HR departments across the U.S. when, on Apr. 4, the latest data release on employment from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that the Great Resignation may have finally slowed down – if not quit – in some so-called knowledge-working industries. However, the trend was still evident in many blue-collar industries.

“It’s no surprise that blue-collar workers are continuing their exodus while office workers have quickly realized the grass probably isn’t greener,” said Leslie Tarnacki, global CHRO for WorkForce Software. She argued the findings proved that if employees were handed the flexibility, autonomy, and “proper tools to fulfill their roles efficiently,” they were “far more likely” to stay with their organizations.

Michigan-based Tarnacki explained the slowdown of the Great Resignation for desked workers. “Much of it was spurred by a demand for flexibility and better work-life balance, which most employers have been able to deliver in some way with remote working and flexible hours,” she said. “For front-line and deskless shift workers, demands have not been so easily met.”

What should business leaders of blue-collar workers take away from the new Bureau of Labor Statistics data? How can they, too, halt the ongoing Great Resignation trend for good?

The full version of this article was first published on Digiday’s future-of-work platform, WorkLife, in April 2023 – to read the complete piece, please click HERE.

WTF is Quittok – and why Gen Z is increasingly doing it when they leave jobs

You’ve heard of quiet quitting but what about loud quitting?

Last year, there was a great deal of noise about quiet quitting — namely, doing the minimum amount required per someone’s job description. Gen Zers led that trend. (Click here for WorkLife’s guide to The Quiet Workplace).

Now many young professionals are taking a very different approach to head for the exit, being as loud as possible by live-streaming their resignations on social media. Their platform of choice: TikTok. Hence the inevitable hashtag #quittok.

So what exactly is quittok, where does it come from, and what are the pros and cons?

The full version of this article was first published on Digiday’s future-of-work platform, WorkLife, in April 2023 – to read the complete piece, please click HERE.

Remote working and ChatGPT fuel rise in people doing multiple jobs on the hush-hush

Conditions have never been more favorable for canny workers looking to make the digital equivalent of hay while the sun shines.

The work trends precipitated by the pandemic fallout, including a shift to remote working and flexible hours, combined with the launch of generative artificial intelligence, mean that those looking to make a lot of dollars on the sly can do so without fear of incrimination.

The latest findings from the job platform CV-Library revealed that 58% of U.K. workers planned to take on a side hustle this year – and that was only the people being truthful about their ambitions. According to the study, the desire for additional income through secondary employment was driven by job security (62%) and earning more money (38%).

The evolution of measuring productivity from a time-based to an output-based metric, plus asynchronous communications – and not needing to be visible online at all times – make the system ripe to be gamed by over-employed workers.

As @Oxgaut rather gloatingly posted on Twitter on Apr. 5: “If you’re not working multiple remote jobs with ChatGPT, you’re leaving money on the table.” The accompanying image to the post – also used above – showed an empty swivel chair in front of a James Bond baddie-like bank of 10 monitors showing maps, graphics, and lines of computer code.

The full version of this article was first published on Digiday’s future-of-work platform, WorkLife, in April 2023 – to read the complete piece, please click HERE.

WTF are chaos monkeys?

Chaos monkey is a term that’s likely familiar to software teams, where it’s known as a tool to test the resilience of IT infrastructures. And with our reliance on technology in the workplace only increasing, ensuring it can perpetually sustain itself is more critical than ever.

But it’s also being applied in a different, broader way across some businesses – to describe either major mindset changes or culture overhauls.

For example, Shopify, the Canadian multinational commerce company, launched its first so-called chaos monkey in early January, when it culled a substantial number of meetings from the calendars of its 11,600 employees.

Deann Evans, Shopify’s director of EMEA partnerships and expansion, told WorkLife that following the enforced changes, time spent in meetings was down by 33% per employee in the first two months of the year compared to the same period in 2022. And yet, the change, caused a period of havoc for teams as they got to grips with such a different daily structure.

For those who are unfamiliar with the term, here’s an explainer.

The full version of this article was first published on Digiday’s future-of-work platform, WorkLife, in April 2023 – to read the complete piece, please click HERE.

How generative AI is muddying copyright laws – what businesses need to know

Elon Musk and almost 4,000 high-profile signatories, including engineers from Amazon, DeepMind, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, attempted to halt the giddying acceleration of generative artificial intelligence in an open letter published in late March.

“Recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control,” read the letter. “Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.”

Everyone should take note when the brightest human – rather than machine – minds are demanding progress be paused. But has the bot not already bolted? And considering the possible competitive advantages if rivals opt to down AI tools, will the temptation to continue pushing the boundaries of technology beyond their current limits not be too irresistible for business leaders?

Many have wasted little time embracing ChatGPT, a large-scale language model fed 300 billion words by developer OpenAI that is “confidently incorrect,” and DALL-E, a similar tool that generates images rather than words. While interest has surged in the former, potentially the bigger, creepier issues are around the latter, specifically copyright infringements.

The full version of this article was first published on Digiday’s future-of-work platform, WorkLife, in April 2023 – to read the complete piece, please click HERE.

How to create a 25% productivity hike: Lessons from Shopify’s meetings purge

When, at the start of the year, Shopify let loose a so-called “chaos monkey” to disrupt the Canadian multinational e-commerce company’s meeting culture, it was a shock to its 11,600 employees.

Initial panic – how would things possibly be achieved without meetings? – was quickly replaced by relief. And new data proved the move was a delightful surprise overall.

On Jan. 3, Kaz Nejatian, Shopify COO, posted about the calendar purge on Twitter. “Meetings are a bug,” he wrote. “To start 2023, we’re cancelling [sic] all Shopify meetings with more than two people. Let’s give people back their maker time.”

Critics who questioned the bold decision might wish to stop reading here. However, business leaders with meeting-heavy company cultures are advised to take note, given the overwhelmingly vindicated strategy shift.

Following Shopify’s enforced changes – including “meeting-free Wednesdays” designed to encourage focused work – in research shared with WorkLife in late March, time spent in meetings dropped by 33% per employee in the first two months of the year compared to the same period in 2022. That time saved will equate to a 25% increase in completed projects by the end of the year, the company has estimated.

The full version of this article was first published on Digiday’s future-of-work platform, WorkLife, in March 2023 – to read the complete piece, please click HERE.

What ‘human-centric’ tech is fixing HR challenges

Has anyone had it more difficult at work than human resources professionals in the last three years?

First, they had to manage and enable a workforce that suddenly couldn’t come into the office due to lockdowns – aside from in industries with increasingly stressed frontline staff, such as healthcare workers, emergency services workers, and teachers.

Next, the great resignation trend, spurred by the pandemic and elongated by, in particular, Gen Zers’ innovative approach to career development and well-being, made life even more challenging.

On top of most companies rethinking their work policies – adding to the HR workload – the criticality of attracting and retaining workers during this period of economic uncertainty, a tightening labor market, and technological advancement, was matched by the need to train and upskill staff so the organization could operate in the coming years.

No wonder a new global survey published by Humaans – a London-headquartered employee management software company – found that 54% of the 1,000 HR managers quizzed considered their roles to have grown more complex, as they navigated an increasingly rocky landscape with ever-shrinking teams and fewer resources.

Thankfully, various HR technology tools have made their working lives more manageable. And there is little surprise that almost half (46%) of HR leaders are planning to invest more in HR tech, according to Gartner research shared in early March.

But what exactly is the most effective HR tech?

The full version of this article was first published on Digiday’s future-of-work platform, WorkLife, in March 2023 – to read the complete piece, please click HERE.

‘Productivity-sapping vampires’: How to improve the hybrid-meetings culture

In theory, hybrid working is perfect, promising flexibility, convenience and empowerment. However, in practice, many organizations are finding, to their horror, it can be the worst of both in-person and remote working. Its logistical complexity has the potential to restrict collaboration and, ultimately, productivity. And that is largely down to the number and inefficiency of hybrid meetings.

“Employees are overwhelmed with meetings — back-to-back meetings, poorly run meetings and just flat-out too many meetings,” said J. P. Gownder, vp and principal analyst at Forrester Research, and co-author of a new report, “Master Hybrid Meetings With These Five Steps.” “Today’s hybrid meetings fail in-person participants, fail remote participants, still, fail to provide social cues, and fail the business.”

Gownder cited Harvard Business Review data from last year that found that 92% of employees considered meetings costly and unproductive, as 70% of meetings kept employees from productive task work.

It wasn’t like this before the coronavirus crisis, though. “The frequency of meetings increased by 13% during the first year of the pandemic, and leaders tell us those meetings were sticky — they never fell off of calendars,” Gownder said. Without taking steps to remedy this problem, “meetings threaten to become productivity-sapping energy vampires,” he added.

So what should be done?

The full version of this article was first published on Digiday’s future-of-work platform, WorkLife, in March 2023 – to read the complete piece, please click HERE.

Why Scandinavian countries lead in gender equity

Yesterday marked the latest Equal Pay Day in the U.S., and it was a milestone edition.

Not only was 2023 the 60th anniversary of the federal Equal Pay Act, but it was also a decade since the Equal Pay Today campaign was established. However, given the still-considerable lack of parity between men’s and women’s pay in the U.S. and further afield, was it cause for celebration?

Not quite yet, but there has been some improvement: The gender pay gap has been closed by 61%, according to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) latest Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI), which benchmarks 146 countries. The research, published in July 2022, calculated 132 years would need to elapse to achieve parity at the current rate of progress.

While that represented a four-year improvement on the 2021 projection, the number 12 months earlier suggested the gap would have closed before the coronavirus struck. Saadia Zahidi, managing director at the Geneva-headquartered WEF, lamented a “generational loss” caused by the pandemic.

The GGGI data revealed that Scandinavian countries lead the way, with Iceland the only economy to have closed more than 90% of the gender gap. Finland (86%), Norway (84.5%), New Zealand (84.1%), and Sweden (82.2%) complete the top five in the rankings.

What could other countries – and businesses – learn from the top-ranked nations?

The full version of this article was first published on Digiday’s future-of-work platform, WorkLife, in March 2023 – to read the complete piece, please click HERE.

‘Full-time no experience’: How cost-of-living crisis is shaping labor trends

Newly released data from global job-search platform Indeed has confirmed what most people already suspected: that the cost-of-living crisis is shaping labor trends, and specifically what prospective employees want from their job.

While some findings were predictable – for example, there were more searches for “full-time no experience” positions, zero-hour contracts, and greater demand for weekly pay in the three months leading up to Jan. 2023 compared to the same period a year ago – the alarmingly steep rise in these areas might shock business leaders and human resources professionals.

For instance, in the U.K., searches on Indeed for zero-hour contracts were up 70%, requests for part-time work had increased by 65%, and “weekend-only” searches jumped 120%. Demand for weekly pay surged by 122%, “full-time no experience” searches rose 219%, and “support worker no experience” was 337% higher.

Ultimately, the results indicated that recruitment models, learning and development and employee experience should urgently be modernized to keep pace with and accommodate workers’ needs and wants.

The full version of this article was first published on Digiday’s future-of-work platform, WorkLife, in March 2023 – to read the complete piece, please click HERE.

Why the need for leaders to address poor workplace communication is so urgent now

Ineffective communication costs U.S. businesses $1.2 trillion annually, or $12,506 per employee, pointed out by Grammarly Business’s latest State of Business Communication report, published in early March. But are leaders receiving the message that urgent improvement is required?

The Grammarly Business survey of 251 business leaders and 1,001 knowledge workers suggested connection problems are growing. Time spent on written communication grew 18% compared to 2022, while worker stress levels were 7% higher due to poor communication, and this caused a 15% decline in productivity.

Further, the research, conducted in partnership with The Harris Poll, showed that workers spent over 70% of their working weeks communicating on various channels. Yet 58% wished they had better tools to streamline communication. “Leaders who shrug off the massive impact of poor communication on their bottom line will lose,” argued Matt Rosenberg, Grammarly’s chief revenue officer and head of Grammarly Business.

Rosenberg said that the results of the second annual report indicated the challenge was growing, causing a “greater impact on everything from operational efficiency to employee and customer satisfaction.” As a result, he urged a rethink of communications strategies. “At a time when the stakes are critically high, leaders who invest in empowering efficient, consistent communication across their organizations will see results and profits climb.”

The full version of this article was first published on Digiday’s future-of-work platform, WorkLife, in March 2023 – to read the complete piece, please click HERE.

Businesses are not putting people in the right jobs – how tech can help

Most business leaders who offer variants of the cliché that “people are the company’s greatest asset” seldom match words with deeds. More worrying, though, is that people are not being matched to jobs in which they can excel – now more than ever.

Alarmingly, a vast majority of organizations were taking the wrong, outdated approach to managing and developing human capital, argued professor Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Digital Economy Lab at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and arguably the world’s leading expert on the role of digital technology in improving productivity.

“Human capital is a $220 trillion asset in the U.S. – bigger than all the other assets put together, and about ten times the country’s gross domestic product,” said Prof. Brynjolfsson. “The most important asset on the planet is the one we’ve been measuring the worse.”

As a result, human capital has been “probably the most misallocated asset on the planet. Businesses are not putting the right people in the right jobs; they’re not hiring, firing, and reassigning where they need to be doing it.”

This gloomy analysis is a lose-lose for employer, employee, and society, added Brynjolfsson. “Think of how many people are not in the right job, living lives of quiet desperation,” he said.

The full version of this article was first published on Digiday’s future-of-work platform, WorkLife, in March 2023 – to read the complete piece, please click HERE.

Stanford professor on the AI skills gap and the dangers of exponential innovation

ChatGPT and its ilk represent a welcome quantum leap for productivity, according to eminent AI expert professor Erik Brynjolfsson. But he adds that such rapid developments also present a material risk

Erik Brynjolfsson is in great demand. The US professor whose research focuses on the relationship between digital tech and human productivity is nearing the end of a European speaking tour that’s lasted nearly a month. Despite this, he’s showing no signs of fatigue – quite the opposite, in fact.

Speaking via Zoom as he prepares for his imminent lecture in Oxford, the director of the Digital Economy Lab at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI is enthused by recent “seminal breakthroughs” in the field.

Brynjolfsson’s tour – which has included appearances at the World Economic Forum in Davos and the Institute for the Future of Work in London – is neatly timed, because the recent arrival of ChatGPT on the scene has been capturing human minds, if not yet hearts.

The large-scale language model, fed 300 billion words by developer OpenAI, caused a sensation with its powerful capabilities, attracting 1 million users within five days of its release in late November 2022. At the end of January, Microsoft’s announcement of a substantial investment in OpenAI “to accelerate AI breakthroughs” generated yet more headlines.

ChatGPT’s popularity is likely to trigger an avalanche of similarly extraordinary AI tools, Brynjolfsson predicts, with a possible economic value extending to “trillions of dollars”. But he adds that proper safeguards and a better understanding of how AI can augment – not replace – jobs are urgently required.

What’s next in AI?

“There have been some amazing, seminal breakthroughs in AI lately that are advancing the frontier rapidly,” Brynjolfsson says. “Everyone’s playing with ChatGPT, but this is just part of a larger class of ‘foundation models’ that is becoming very important.”

He points to the image generator DALL-E (another OpenAI creation) and lists similar tools designed for music, coding and more. Such advances are comparable to that of deep learning, which enabled significant leaps in object recognition a decade ago.

“There’s been a quantum improvement in the past couple of years as these foundational models have been introduced more widely. And this is just the first wave,” Brynjolfsson says. “The folks working on them tell me that there’s far more in the pipeline that we’ll be hearing about in the coming weeks.”

As much as I’m blown away by these technologies, the bottleneck is our human response

When pushed for examples of advances that could shape the future of work, he reveals that Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) – the language model that uses deep learning to emulate human writing – will be superseded by GPT-4 “within weeks. This is a ‘phased change of improvement’ compared with the last one, but it’ll be even more capable of solving all sorts of problems.”

Elsewhere, great strides are being made with “multi-agent systems” designed to enable more effective interactions between AI and humans. In effect, AI tech will gain the social skills required to cooperate and negotiate with other systems and their users.

“This development is opening up a whole space of new capabilities,” Brynjolfsson declares.

The widening AI skills gap

As thrilling as these pioneering tools may sound, the seemingly exponential rate of innovation presents some dangers, he warns.

“AI is no longer a laboratory curiosity or something you see in sci-fi movies,” Brynjolfsson says. “It can benefit almost every company. But governments and other organisations haven’t been keeping up with developments – and our skills haven’t either. The gap between our capabilities and what the technology enables and demands has widened. I think that gap will be where most of the big challenges – and opportunities – for society lie over the next decade or so.”

Brynjolfsson, who studied applied maths and decision sciences at Harvard in the 1980s, started in his role at Stanford in July 2020 with the express aim of tackling some of these challenges.

“We created the Digital Economy Lab because, as much as I’m blown away by these technologies, the bottleneck is our human response,” he says. “What will we do about the economy, jobs and ethics? How will we transform organisations that aren’t changing nearly fast enough? I want to speed up our response.”

Brynjolfsson spoke passionately about this subject at Davos in a session entitled “AI and white-collar jobs”. In it, he advised companies to adopt technology in a controlled manner. Offering a historical analogy, he pointed out that, when electricity infrastructure became available about a century ago, it took at least three decades for most firms to fully realise the productivity gain it offered because they first needed to revamp their workplaces to make the best use of it.

“We’re in a similar period with AI,” Brynjolfsson told delegates. “What AI is doing is affecting job quality and how we do the work. So we must address to what extent we keep humans in the loop rather than focus on driving down wages.”

Why AI will create winners and losers

The risk of technology racing too far ahead of humanity for comfort is a familiar topic for Brynjolfsson. In both Race Against the Machine (2011) and The Second Machine Age (2014), he and his co-author, MIT scientist Andrew McAfee, called for greater efforts to update organisations, processes and skills.

AI can benefit almost every company. But governments and other organisations haven’t been keeping up with developments – and our skills haven’t either

How would he assess the current situation? “When we wrote those books, we were optimistic about the pace of technological change and pessimistic about our ability to adapt,” Brynjolfsson says. “It turns out that we weren’t optimistic enough about the technology or pessimistic enough about our institutions and skills.”

In fact, the surprising acceleration of AI means that the “timeline for when we’ll have artificial general intelligence” should be shortened by decades, he argues. “AGI will be able to do most of the things that humans can. Some predicted that this would be achieved by the 2060s, but now people are talking about the 2030s or even earlier.”

Given the breakneck speed of developments, how many occupations are at risk of obsolescence through automation?

Brynjolfsson concedes that the range of roles affected is looking “much broader than earlier thought. There will be winners and losers. Jobs will be enhanced in many cases, but some will be eliminated. Routine work will become increasingly automated – and there will also be a flourishing of fantastic creativity. If we use these tools correctly, there will be positive disruption. If we don’t, inequality could deepen, further concentrating wealth and political power.”

How to apply AI in the workplace

How, then, should businesses integrate AI into their operations? First, they must avoid what Brynjolfsson has labelled the Turing trap.

“One of the biggest misconceptions about AI – especially among AI researchers, by the way – is that it needs to do everything that humans do and replace them to be effective,” he explains, arguing that the famous test for machine intelligence, proposed by Alan Turing in 1950, is “an inspiring but misguided vision”.

Brynjolfsson contends that a “mindset shift” at all levels – from scientists and policy-makers to employers and workers – is required to harness AI’s power to shape society for good. “We should ask: ‘What do we want these powerful tools for? And how can we use them to achieve our goals?’ The tools don’t decide; we decide.”

One of the biggest misconceptions about AI is that it needs to do everything that humans do and replace them

He adds that many business leaders have the wrong attitude to applying new tech in general and AI in particular. This amounts to a “pernicious problem”.

To illustrate this, he cites Waymo’s experiments with self-driving vehicles: “These work 99.9% of the time, but there is a human safety driver overseeing the system and a second safety driver in case the first one falls asleep. People watching each other is not the right path to driverless cars.”

Brynjolfsson commends an alternative route, which has been taken by the Toyota Research Institute, among others. When he was in Davos, the institute’s CEO, Dr Gill Pratt “told me how his team has flipped things around so that the autonomous system is used as the guardian angel. Creating a self-driving car that works in all possible conditions is tough, but humans can handle those exceptions.”

With a person making most decisions in the driving seat, the AI intervenes “occasionally – for instance, when there’s a looming accident. I think this is a good model, not only for self-driving cars, but for many other applications where humans and machines work together.”

For similar reasons, Brynjolfsson lauds Cresta, a provider of AI systems for customer contact centres. Its products keep humans “at the forefront” of operations instead of chatbots, whose apparent Turing test failures continue to frustrate most people who deal with them.

“The AI gives them suggestions about what to mention to customers,” he says. “This system does dramatically better in terms of both productivity and customer satisfaction. It closes the skills gap too.”

Does Brynjolfsson have a final message for business leaders before he heads off to give his next lecture? “We need to catch up and keep control of these technologies,” he says. “If we do that, I think the next 10 years will be the best decade we’ve ever had on this planet.”

This article was first published by Raconteur, as part of the Future of Work special report in The Times, in February 2023

Can a ‘signature scent’ boost office appeal – or does it reek of desperation?

According to U.S. poet Diane Ackerman, “nothing is more memorable than a smell.” She wrote: “One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town.”

Perhaps leaders with a good nose for business have been reading Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses. Scents are now being diffused into more workplaces – partly to attract employees and clients and develop positive brand associations. But while retailers, members clubs, and hotels have been wafting whiffs around for some time, does doing so in an office setting work, or does it, well, reek of desperation?

Jane Helliwell, founder of The Scent Styling Company, stressed the magic of a good smell. “Never underestimate the power of scent on a person’s mood,” she said. Further, certain fragrances can alter a worker’s mindset. For instance, rosemary is known to have a positive effect on memory and alertness, said Helliwell. Meanwhile, lemon is “great for cognitive function.” Jasmine is “energizing,” and ginger helps fight fatigue and “enhances performance and productivity.”

The full version of this article was first published on Digiday’s future-of-work platform, WorkLife, in March 2023 – to read the complete piece, please click HERE.