AI and Work
Randy Wolken, President & CEO
The fear that artificial intelligence (AI) will eliminate work is understandable. Nearly every major technological transformation has generated similar concerns. Mechanization changed agriculture. Electricity transformed factories. Automobiles disrupted entire industries while creating new ones. Computers automated calculations and recordkeeping. The internet reshaped commerce, communication, and nearly every modern occupation.
In each case, some jobs disappeared. More often, however, work changed and jobs increased. People learned new skills, assumed expanded responsibilities, created new products and services, and became more productive. Technology eliminated certain tasks while increasing the value of distinctly human capabilities.
AI Is Many Things
The phrase “artificial intelligence” can make AI sound like a single powerful machine competing against humanity. In reality, AI is many different technologies performing many different functions.
AI can serve as a research assistant that gathers information in minutes, a writing partner that helps organize ideas and improve communication, or an analytical tool that identifies patterns in large amounts of data. It can translate languages, generate computer code, support product design, personalize education, detect quality problems, predict equipment failures, improve supply chains, and help leaders consider alternatives.
In advanced manufacturing, AI can help engineers explore more designs, operators better understand complex equipment, technicians anticipate maintenance needs, and quality teams identify defects earlier. It can reduce administrative burdens and allow people to spend more time solving problems, improving processes, serving customers, developing employees, and creating value.
The question isn’t simply, “What work can AI do?”
The more important question is, “What can our people accomplish when AI expands their capabilities?”
A calculator didn’t eliminate mathematicians. Computer-aided design didn’t eliminate engineers. Industrial automation didn’t eliminate manufacturing. These technologies changed the work and increased what skilled people could accomplish.
AI may become one of the most powerful productivity tools ever created. Productivity isn’t the enemy of employment. Over time, productivity raises living standards, lowers costs, expands markets, creates new demand, and makes new industries possible.
Jobs Will Change – and New Jobs Will Emerge
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 doesn’t predict the end of work. Based on the expectations of more than 1,000 major employers representing over 14 million workers, it projects that broad economic, demographic, technological, and environmental changes could create approximately 170 million jobs worldwide by 2030 while displacing 92 million – a net increase of 78 million jobs.
Those numbers are projections, not guarantees. They also reflect forces beyond AI alone. But they offer an important counterweight to the assumption that technological progress inevitably produces permanent mass unemployment.
The future will involve job transformation, not job extinction.
Some routine responsibilities will be automated. Some occupations will become smaller. New occupations will emerge. Most importantly, many existing jobs will be redesigned around a new partnership between human judgment and machine capability.
An operator becomes a more capable process technician. A technician uses AI to diagnose increasingly complex systems. An engineer evaluates hundreds of design possibilities instead of a handful. A supervisor spends less time assembling reports and more time coaching people. A workforce professional creates more personalized learning experiences. Leaders have greater access to information while remaining responsible for judgment, relationships, values, and decisions.
AI can provide information. It can’t accept responsibility.
It can generate options. It can’t determine what an organization should value.
It can imitate empathy. It can’t genuinely care for another person.
It can help us work. It can’t tell us why our work matters.
Leadership Must Replace Fear with Preparation
Optimism doesn’t mean complacency. The transition will create disruption, and its benefits won’t arrive automatically or evenly. Some workers will need new skills. Some organizations will adapt faster than others. Entry-level roles and career pathways may change. Leaders have a responsibility to help people prepare.
But fear isn’t a workforce strategy.
The goal shouldn’t be to preserve every task exactly as it exists today. The goal should be to help people continually grow toward higher-value work.
That requires investment in AI literacy, technical education, apprenticeships, lifelong learning, leadership development, and flexible pathways for workers to gain new capabilities. Organizations should involve employees in redesigning work rather than imposing technology upon them. The people closest to the work understand best where AI can remove frustration, improve quality, strengthen safety, and create greater value.
The successful organizations won’t ask, “How many people can AI replace?”
They will ask, “How much more can our people accomplish because they have AI?”
That is a fundamentally different leadership mindset.
The Human-Centered Future of Work
AI may become better than people at many individual tasks. But a job isn’t one task. Work is a combination of knowledge, relationships, judgment, creativity, accountability, trust, adaptability, service, and purpose.
The future belongs to people and organizations that learn how to combine powerful technology with human wisdom. The challenge isn’t to protect people from the future but to prepare people to shape it – by redesigning work, investing in skills, and embedding AI into everyday processes in ways that elevate human contribution rather than diminish it.
The future of work must be built intentionally. Leaders must define where AI can augment human decision-making, train people to use it responsibly, measure its impact on productivity and quality, and continually improve how people and technology work together. The organizations that succeed won’t necessarily be those that adopt AI the fastest, but those that integrate it the smartest, aligning technology with purpose, empowering people to grow, and turning expanded capability into sustained performance.
But someone who learns to use AI effectively will be able to do more, learn faster, solve harder problems, and create greater value. Our responsibility as leaders is to ensure that opportunity is available to everyone.