Ways of Work

Key Takeaway:

In 2024 and onwards, there will be a significant shift towards skills-based hiring and flexible work arrangements propelled by AI integration. This evolution redefines traditional life stages and employment norms, emphasizing personal well-being and efficiency. As AI reshapes roles, it offers challenges and opportunities, necessitating a balanced approach to leverage its potential for productivity and innovation across various industries.

Trend Type: Social & Business

Sub-trends: Life Deconstruction, Working for Balance, From creators to curators, Augmented connected workforce, AI Ways of Work

May, 2024 • Less than 4 min read

Life Milestones Being Reconsidered
In the rapidly evolving landscape of modern work, the concept of employment is undergoing profound transformations across various dimensions, driven by a convergence of technological innovation, cultural shifts, and economic pressures. At both the individual and societal levels, the traditional milestones of life are being reconsidered, with a newfound focus on dividing life into quarters—growth, achievement, becoming, and harvesting—supporting the idea of an extended active working life that could span 50 years or more. This reassessment of education and career paths is evidenced by the growing popularity of skills-based hiring, with an impressive 76% of employers embracing this approach and 55% utilizing role-specific skills tests, as reported by TestGorilla’s 2022 study.
Worker’s Personal Well Being
Simultaneously, workers are increasingly prioritizing personal well-being over relentless career advancement, with a remarkable 50% of the global workforce willing to accept a 20% pay cut in exchange for a better quality of life. In Europe, the flexibility to work from home is becoming more prevalent, with projections indicating that 40% of employees will work remotely or in a hybrid mode by 2024, underpinned by flexible working legislation. This stands in contrast to the current 28% of US employees who work from home. The increasing adoption of AI is perceived as a boon to achieving a better work-life balance, guiding career decisions and enhancing job fulfillment.
The Impact of AI
In fact, the impact of AI on the global workforce is a topic of intense debate, with the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2023 revealing that business leaders anticipate 23% of global jobs to change within the next five years. A staggering 75% of survey respondents plan to adopt AI in their operations, while 62% intend to incorporate text, image, and voice processing technologies. Estimates suggest that up to 62% of work time involves language-based tasks, and generative AI has the potential to automate 60-70% of employees’ time today, according to McKinsey. It reports that approximately 75% of the value that generative AI use cases could deliver falls across customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering, and R&D. The adoption of AI could boost productivity growth by 1.5 percentage points per year over a 10-year period and raise global GDP by 7% ($7 trillion in additional output), according to Goldman Sachs. For this to happen, a strategic integration of AI and analytics to enhance workforce capabilities is crucial as it accelerates skill acquisition and adapts itself to digital demands across all job types. By 2027, 25% of CIOs aim to use these technologies to halve the time required to train employees in key roles.
Furthermore, a Bruegel study highlights a north-south and east-west divide in the distributional impact of generative AI on European labor markets, with northern European countries displaying higher exposure compared to their southern counterparts, particularly in language modeling. Jobs with the highest potential for automation include Credit Authorizers, Checkers, and Clerks (81%), Management Analysts (70%), Telemarketers (68%), Statistical Assistants (61%), and Tellers (60%). Conversely, positions with the greatest potential for augmentation include Insurance Underwriters (100%), Bioengineers and Biomedical Engineers (84%), Mathematicians (80%), and Editors (72%).
Industries with the highest estimates of total potential exposure to AI include financial services, IT and digital communications, media, entertainment, and sports. The creative industries, in particular, are witnessing significant change, as economic pressures and a culture of efficiency transform creativity, with AI playing a growing role in content generation. This shift has led to a decrease in the direct creation of original works, as human roles evolve towards curating and enhancing AI-generated content. This phenomenon is part of a broader narrative where traditional creativity is overshadowed by technological efficiency, potentially leading to cultural stagnation unless innovatively addressed.

Use Cases

MIT Mediated Athmosphere

Working for Balance: MIT’s Mediated Athmosphere project envisions a smart office that is capable of dynamically transforming itself to enhance occupants’ work experience. It explores augmenting and mediating human experience, interaction, and perception with sensor networks.

Nightshade: AI Tool Protecting Artists

From creators to curators: In Nightshade – a tool that enables artists to embed imperceptible alterations to their artwork’s pixels before online uploads. If the art is captured for an AI training dataset, these changes can disrupt the resulting model, leading to erratic and unforeseen outcomes. By “poisoning” the training data with this tool, it can corrupt subsequent versions of image-generating AI models.

AirBnB: Work From Anywhere

Working For Balance: Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky sent an email to all employees announcing the company was adopting what it called the “live and work anywhere” policy, which allows employees to work from home or the office and move anywhere in the country they work in (without a change to their compensation

Use Cases

MIT Mediated Athmosphere

Working for Balance:

Nightshade: AI Tool Protecting Artists

From creators to curators:

AirBnB: Work From Anywhere

Working For Balance:

Sub-Trend Sources
Life Deconstruction: Accenture Life Trends
Working for Balance: Ford Trends (social), Forrester Tech Predictions Europe
From creators to curators: Accenture Life Trends, WARC, NextAtlas
Augmented connected workforce: Gartner Strategic Trends
AI Ways of Work: Forbes Tech Predictions, Future Today Institute, VML The Future 100, WEF Jobs of Tomorrow GenAI, PWC AI Trends, McKinsey Tech Trends Outlook, McKinsey Economic Potential of GenAI, McKinsey GenAI Reset, Finance & Development

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