How HR Leaders Are Preparing for the AI-Enabled Workforce

The promise — and threat — of AI is real. But the impact on jobs has not yet arrived in most organizations. As recently as 2017, headlines such as “Bosses Believe Your Work Skills Will Soon Be Useless” (from the The Washington Post) were common. Oxford University researchers argued in 2013 that 47% of U.S. jobs were at risk of loss to automation. MIT launched its institute-wide task force on the future of work in 2018. Leaders around the world began to consider how their organizations would be different when thousands of their employees’ jobs are automated away. Fast-forward a few years, and the story is different. As with many technologies, reality did not keep up with the hype — at least not right away. The analysts, managers, and industry gurus forgot the first law of digital innovation: Technology changes quickly, but organizations change much more slowly. Many people are working with smart machines in their daily work, but few have lost their jobs to them.