The Future Of Work Has No Jobs.
Exploring how AI is turning careers from fixed jobs into evolving stories of problem-solving.
The 9-to-5 job had already been gone for a while.
Recently, we had the gig economy. The work from anywhere period.
Conversely, we had the great resignation. Quiet quitting. Resenteeism.
Each work era usually comes with its very own phrase.
What will it be in the AI world?
Will you be holding an AI-brid role in which you manage swarms of agents and co-bots?
Don’t hold your breath. I won’t pepper this newsletter with neologisms and buzzwords.
Instead, let’s imagine what your role might truly look like in a not-so-distant future, without the hype.
Job-as-a-service, a collapse in progress
Fret not. There will still be a job market going forward. One will argue its key agents are broken today, and that the next wave of AI might well tear it to pieces. I’d like to take a deliberately more optimistic view. Even if I am well aware that predicting a doomsday for the world of work would generate far more engagement.
Jobs were once containers: safe, solid, and clearly labeled. You had a scope, a title, and a ladder. The scope was clear for a few weeks, the title stable for a few months and the ladder predictable for a few years. Those containers are being dissolved by AI and automation.
If workflows get automated, your very presence in the corporate value chain is at least diluted, if not washed away. An opportunity for you to focus on higher value activities and shine in front of the leadership team with deep customer insights? Well, think again. Combined with generative technologies, machine learning is making them available to anybody in a flash.
If both routine and high-value tasks are taken away, what’s left? A lot, in fact.
We still cling to the “job” as an identity – and I believe it’s a perfectly human reflex.
However -and independently of the rise of AI- we are indeed losing jobs in a traditional sense. We are losing job shapes.
The modular you, a rise in progress
Regardless of your field of expertise, I bet you enjoy a change of scenery in your work: switching between problems, rotating between projects, moving between purposes. This nurtures our natural tendency to relish newness, and it turns out it is a healthy habit for our brain to seek new horizons and evolve in new contexts. There’s an entire case on curiosity here.
Work becomes networked, not hierarchical.
You don’t “have” a job anymore; you enter a system: a system of thoughts, behaviours and dynamics. Thriving in these new work systems take some getting used to, but rest assured it is a future-proof career strategy: the next resume will not be a list of jobs. It will be a map of problems you solved or want to solve. Being an active component of the problem-solving systems is the most effective way to preserve your agility and to ensure your relevance.
You may argue that it’s an advice worth sharing for mid-career professionals, who already have problem-solving experience. These days, one of the burning questions posed by AI is around the future of entry-level roles.
This, to me, used to be a valid question if you looked at the world of work through a rigid lens of a job as a series of tasks. This is obsolete thinking, regardless of the industry.
The relevant question to start addressing now is not about entry jobs for younger generations – even if I admit the transition period we are in is painful for all the talent on the bench.
The relevant question simply is: where are we going to learn how to think going forward?
Fluidity over stability
This question opens a fresh perspective on professional horizons and should kick start a long due overdue process:
On the corporate side, rethinking job descriptions
On the regulatory side, removing all boundaries between the world of learning and the world of working
On the student and worker side, forgetting about traditional career paths
All three steps require hard work: it introduces a new way to think about hiring, working and growing. But the simple fact of setting them in motion would give the job market a lot more fluidity and transparency:
Companies would have access to a wider talent pool, exposing to them to unseen demand.
Conversely, workers would finally get to rely on factors other than pure luck or privileged relationships to land a stimulating role
The current macroeconomic context is not giving any stakeholder any incentive to initiate any movement on that front. Uncertain times make us fix what’s broken, not lay new foundations.
Regardless, what is certain is that the AI-elevated workplace will accelerate the erosion of corporate loyalty, cementing further the crude reality that was already setting in.
The “people are our greatest asset” statement has been misused, overused and abused by many leadership teams, and contradicted by the darker reality of poorly justified layoffs, intense shareholder pressure and dirty office politics.
Unless things take a surprising turn, the social contract of work will keep becoming looser and looser. Unavoidably, it will reinforce the need for workers to build their own portfolio, thereby turning the diversity of their career paths into their most valuable asset.
I will gladly explore this topic in my future newsletter.
No, the future job is not a job. And It is not a contradiction: this comes as the logical evolution of the trajectory we are sent on by technological progress.
The primary source of concern is that this very progress, however amazing, keeps drawing a disproportionate amount of our attention. Observing it, and not necessarily fully anticipating its implications, we humans have entered into a reactive mode, letting emerging technologies dictate the future shape of work.
I do believe it’s up to all stakeholders -businesses, workers, regulators, thought leaders- to outline what an AI-augmented job should look like.
Without further ado, one can already take action on an individual level by reshaping his or her professional story. Like any powerful story, it will include plot twists, unbreathable tension and unexpected cliffhangers – all aiming at one thing: positioning the worker as a polyvalent and adaptable problem-solver. This, ultimately, will help rebalance or reverse the traditional employer-employee relationship.