A.I. will probably not steal your jobexcept if youre doing that one. While white collar jobs as we know them are hardly set to disappear, a handful of them will dwindle hugely, according to Joseph Fuller, a professor of management at Harvard Business School, and Fuller should knowbefore Harvard, he spent three decades heading a consulting firm focused on corporate strategy and competitiveness that was ultimately acquired by Deloitte. At HBS, he co-leads the Managing the Future of Work initiative, which researches the shifting global product and labor markets, evolving regulations, and the gig economy. Theres one type of job he wouldnt want right now.
I wouldnt want to be someone who does the reading or summarization of business books to send out 20-page summaries, because A.I. is really good at summarization already, Fuller told Fortune.
A.I. has already become a powerhouse across sectors and disciplessome say its moving faster than real life. Just last year, OpenAI unveiled the now-ubiquitous ChatGPT and Google launched DeepMind, which went on to predict the structure of nearly every protein in the human body.
Back at the office, the next phase of work is taking material shape, particularly as generative A.I. becomes a cornerstone of modern business. Fuller predicts that a significant chunk of what people do today will go away, although he adds that a material amount of work will remain.
As A.I. goes multimodalable to draw on pictorial, audio and alphanumeric data to carry out processesour current iteration of ChatGPT could soon seem quaint. Thats where the trouble for workers whose jobs are easy to automate might really kick in. That doesnt catch workers entirely by surprise; 40% of them who are familiar with ChatGPT are concerned it will replace their jobs completely, per a March 2023 Harris poll.
Yet many experts, including Microsofts CEO Satya Nadella, whose company invested heavily in OpenAI, insist that A.I. is no threat to human ingenuity and creativity. When executed correctly, A.I. in the workplace doesnt threaten real jobs, Nadella said; it just eliminates the drudgery.
Indeed, A.I. is very effective in making real people more productive, Fuller saysfor better or worse.
Out with the rote, in with the creative
Routine contract lawyersthose who write out standard submissionswill be the first to see their jobs go, Fuller anticipates. Other workers in jobs with similarly rote duties will follow in short order. There will be open source data that will knock out 90% of their billable hours, he says.
Luckily, thats probably just a few peoples idea of a dream job. The future of white collar work looks a lot less dull, a lot less routine, and [has] a lot less filling out of expense resorts or quarterly forecast updates, Fuller says; business intelligence systems will gobble up most of the boring stuff.
Whats left for humans? Judgment, motivation, collaboration, and articulating a vision, even a vision for what A.I. itself can do next. Luckily for most workers, thats what bosses want and need most. The World Economic Forums 2023 Future of Jobs report found that four of the top five skills employers are going to demand in the next five years are creative thinking, analytical thinking, curiosity and lifelong learning, and resilience/flexibility/agility.
That sounds like the fun part of work to me, Fuller says. And much harder to automate.
