The Future of Work Fallacy: Many leaders still struggle to grasp the current capabilities—and short-term potential impact—of generative AI. There seems to be this belief that society and the economy will adapt as they always have when general purpose technologies emerge. That we won’t have massive disruption to the workforce and displacement of jobs.
I’ve heard this first-hand from leading economists, and have had dozens of conversations with business leaders who follow this line of thinking.
I have always struggled to understand this perspective.
Here’s an exercise I used on Ep. 130 of the podcast (which drops Jan. 14) to demonstrate why I think we are in for far more change—far faster—than most people are prepared for:
1) Take each person on your team.?
2) Find out the tasks they spend the majority of their time doing.
3) Train 3 custom GPTs to assist them with the repetitive tasks they do every day / week.
4) Train them how to use the custom GPTs.
5) Benchmark their performance before, and their performance after.
You will unlock a minimum of 10% efficiency gains in their job within 90 days (probably way sooner).
Now, let’s consider the compounding effect of those gains across an organization:
* Estimate 22 work days / month x 8 hours per day = 176 hours per month per full-time employee (round up to 180 for this exercise)
* A 10% efficiency gain saves 18 hours per month, per employee. Nice, but not transformative if one person is doing it.
* In a 10 person company (with full Gen AI adoption), that’s 180 hours per month or 1 FTE.
* In a 100 person company, that’s 1,800 hours per month or 10 FTE.
* In a 1,000 person company, that’s 18,000 hours per month, or 100 FTE.
* In a 10,000 person company, that’s 180,000 hours per month, or 1,000 FTE
I’m being intentionally conservative here with 10% to prove a point.
I think in many jobs today it could easily be 20 - 30% if people are trained to build and deploy GPTs in their jobs.
And this is with today’s AI models and custom GPTs, which OpenAI hasn’t even touched in over a year.
Now tell me how AI won’t completely disrupt the job market and economy in the next 2 years.
We will simply need fewer people doing the same amount of work.
Publicly traded companies, private-equity owned companies, and VC backed companies will be seduced by the potential short-term gains that come with workforce reduction (not all, but many).
Lack of understanding (i.e. AI literacy) and human resistance to change may slow things down in some industries, but the technology can transform businesses with the will and vision to build AI-forward companies.
The probability of disruption to the future of work is too high to do nothing.
Take action now to assess the impact of AI on jobs and people in your company.
Develop a responsible AI adoption strategy that is human-centered, and put a plan in place to begin reskilling and upskilling yourself and the workforce.
