Name: Reprogramming the Workforce: AI's Impact on Jobs & Learning
Uploaded: 2025-05-19
Duration: 18 min 27 s

As AI rapidly transforms the world of work, organizations are rethinking how jobs are structured, how people are hired, and how teams grow their skills. Hear from leaders at the forefront of AI adoption share about what the rise of AI means for workforce strategy and how employers can adapt. What happens when tasks are redefined, roles are restructured, and entirely new skill sets emerge overnight? From rethinking hiring pipelines to creating AI-augmented employee experiences, this session will explore how work itself is being redefined — and what it takes to ensure people stay at the center of that transformation. 

Reprogramming the Workforce: AI's Impact on Jobs & Learning

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All right, hey, everybody. All right, let's do a quick poll, because we're all friends here. How many people are anxious about artificial intelligence? Raise your hand. 00, all right. I would say about half the room. Thank you, Chris. Thank you. Um. Because we are all friends and we're having a good time here, I'm going to start off by quoting none other than the great lyricist Dochi. Anxiety, keep on trying me, feel it quietly trying to silence me. That's what it feels like with AI in the business world today. Yes, I just made that connection. Juliet, what are organizations doing wrong? This is supposed to be the most great, greatest, most transformational thing in the world. Why is everybody so freaked out about it? I think first of all just to say I also used to be someone that was super anxious about this and so I deeply relate to those to those fears. um I think that I think that one of the things that uh we need to do in this moment is is actually start to change the way we we talk about job replacement. I think that this is really about something even bigger than that. It's about a reimagination of jobs. It's about a redistribution of of how we work and you know as a as a people person and an optimist, I have a lot of, I think, faith and optimism about how humans throughout history have actually adapted and leveraged technology for progress and I, I really think that at the end of the day if there's one thing I do want to communicate, it's that the best antidote to fear and anxiety is actually knowledge and understanding and so I think that this is why it is so critical that companies put this technology in the hands of employees. Now the lovely thing about this room is that you're all people, people, so I, I do love that very much. um, Chris, what are you seeing? You see you have a lot of data that you see about how uh uh organizations are responding, reacting, pursuing artificial intelligence. What are you seeing from your perspective? Yeah, I mean, I'll just start first of all, we're super happy to be here and thank you for for having us, um. I raised my hand. Let me just address that. Please do. Someone, someone asked me a couple of years ago, are you excited or concerned about AI? And my answer is yes. And I think it's not only possible but actually necessary to hold both of those at the same time. Anything that has sufficient power to transform the world like this technology does should be treated with excitement and with with concern and care. Um, what we're seeing, so we have a group of labor economists that sit within Indeed that look at our data and they ask questions about what's happening in the world of work. Svea Goodell, our chief economist, is here today. You should talk to her. She knows more about what's happening in the world of work than pretty much anyone. Her team has done a bunch of research over the last couple years, super briefly. We took about 3000 distinct skills from millions and millions of job descriptions. And looked at generative AI's ability to perform each of those skills individually on the axes of general knowledge, pretty good, reasoning, getting a whole lot better, but then necessary for physical presence. So AI can do math very well. It can't draw on IV quite, quite yet. Um, and what we found is 22 headlines. Number one, the good news, there is not a single job anywhere that AI can perform all of the skills required for that job. It doesn't mean it won't replace workers, but, uh, it can't, it can't completely replace, uh, a job, but. The second headline, the one that that's most interesting to me, is that for about 2/3 of all jobs, 50% or more of those skills are things that today's generative AI can do reasonably well or very well, and that's only going to get better. And what that says is that pretty much every job is. If it's not changing already, is going to change, and it's going to happen rapidly. We're expecting, or I'm personally expecting, I've been doing this for a little over 30 years. If you look at the change that's happened because of the internet to pretty much every line of work, there's a handful of occupations that over the next 3 years are going to see 30 years of change. And so what we're seeing is that people are going to have to adapt very, very quickly to how they work, but also how they hire and how they find jobs. Now if I'm a worker at one of these organizations, I'm thinking, well, I like my job, you know, that's why I'm still in it. uh, if I'm thinking, you know, I like our culture, you know, that's why I'm still here. So Julia, coming back to you since you touched on this a little earlier, uh, what is one to do with the, you know, addition of artificial intelligence to this? Do we have to rethink an already successful culture? Do we have to rethink already effective jobs? I, I would say that especially on the culture front, yes, we do have to rethink what culture looks like so I, you know, obviously I'm working at an organization that has probably one of the most AI curious, uh, uh, workforces in the world. AI maybe you've heard of it, um, and, and I just, just to say this, even OpenAI has to work really hard to make sure that that our employees are using these tools to their full potential. And you know the way we're thinking about building culture at OpenAI and AI curious culture is in three ways. One, it's who we hire, um, are, you know, people are self-selecting and of course to, uh, to open AI, but we are starting to embed a kind a basic liter literacy for AI into our interview processes, uh, how you lead, uh, this is really, I think as as leaders this is table stakes, uh, if you're. Not already using our technology in your workplace right now. Come see me, but at, but, but, but, but at a baseline, you know, we have free tools like pick up chat GBT, use it, use it for yourself personally, um, that is it, it's really critical to being able to, to, uh, sell the merits and and the benefits of the technology and then, uh, building AI curious culture. Uh, this might be a little bit silly, but host a hackathon. On right, interrogate your manual processes, get people excited about what you can be doing and what the possibilities are when using these tools, or um host an interdepartmental competition to see who can come up with the most clever use cases, uh, for applying AI to their to their work. And then if you want to be like a little bit spicier and more like open AI um for every on boarding class class, ask them to host a debate. about the merits and drawbacks of AI. This actually really makes it more accessible, makes it more accessible, excuse me, and really kind of lowers the barrier just to have conversations about this technology. So at the end of the day culture is really of course about who you hire, how you lead, and the space that you create for this technology. A debate you have you held a debate about AI and opened. It it is critically important for us to be able to understand both the positive sides of this impact and where there could be drawbacks. You've called this In our previous conversations you've called this rebalancing the organization. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the most exciting things about this technology is that we're going to be able to offload some of the more mundane or some of the more repetitive tasks, and I think that what what I'm seeing as a user of this technology is, is the impact that you're able to have. The surface area upon which we're able to operate is expanding. Um, there, the, the, the amount of, I, I think people mistake chat chat GPT for, for only being a tool for automation, but when you really practice it and when you really get into it, it, we are, we are going from idea to execution at a pace we we never thought possible. And not only that, we're learning more as we go. Yeah, Chris. It has become it's, it's rather in vogue to be a CEO who sends a memo to the entire organization that says we are an AI first company and we all must use the AI, however defined, right? Generative, agenttic, whatever. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna digress here. Um, there are several prominent CEOs that have done just that. You can see where it comes from. There's board pressure. There's obviously CEO pressure, um, there's competitive pressure. You are a CEO. Is it top down? Is it bottom up? How must the AI revolution actually play out? Yeah, I mean one option is just Send Toby's memo to everyone. Yes, a lot of CEOs are doing that. Toby Luke from Shopify just sent one that was actually very well reasoned and thought out and essentially said that AI is now mandatory at Shopify and it's going to be used in performance reviews. It's going to be, uh, you can't hire anyone before saying that AI can't do this job, and I, I understand and I think it's it's actually useful to have that conversation. What we have found is that Um, in general, with almost everything we do, that top down is important to help point in a direction, but, um, I don't know how many of you feel like if you say something immediately everyone does it. It doesn't matter what your job title is, that's not how it works. It's like, I mean. I'm a parent. It never worked that way. I was gonna say, do you want to you want to poll them? We can poll them. But but so what I'll say, we had this conversation last week when we were talking about this, the most effective thing we've had. So in engineering we had a handful of people who started using AI coding tools. We made them available to everyone. We encouraged people to experiment and some people were skeptical, some people were uninterested, and some people dove right in. There's this guy Bob. We talked about Bob. Bob is a real person, and Bob just sort of fell in. Love with trying every single thing out and started doing really amazing work and and what we figured out actually the most effective thing was just Bob started making videos that he started sharing with the whole engineering team of the stuff that he was doing and how it was making his life better and we have found that the bottoms, I mean you have to have some top down, but the bottoms up is so much more effective because the deal is when something comes from top down, it seems like management wants you to do this because it's going to be good for the company. And what you really want is this is going to make your life so much better. You're gonna be able to do things more, you know, with so much more ease with when it comes to coding with less errors, it's gonna take you less time to get things into production. You can do so much more, so people get really excited and so you know I think that finding the champions, giving people a chance to figure out what works for them and then letting them be the uh the spokespeople has been so much more effective for us. So I started this conversation by asking, and we kind of, you know. Went around it and I'm so I'm gonna come back to it. um, what are organizations doing incorrectly here? So what I'm hearing from you is that you know the top down memo can be very effective. um, maybe we need more context that's a uh a misstep. What else are organizations doing wrong and what should we all in this room avoid in this great AI push, either one of you. I, I, I think that one of the things that that organizations might be doing wrong is they might be framing this as a cost cutting exercise, and I think that they might even be, isn't it, I, I think, I think that that is a second order effect once you focus on the first order effects, and I think that that that even. If I'm an employee, what I don't want to hear from from management and leadership is we're going to squeeze more productivity and efficiency out of you. That is not the type, I mean this is maybe my people bias speaking, but like that's not the type of motivating message that I want to hear. What I want to hear is what is the impact that you can have when you use these tools. And how are you able to grow and and learn as an employee? I'll I'll share a quick story. Uh, last week I was interviewing, uh, an HRBP and I said, What do you, what do you love about chat GPT? And she said, Julia, chat GBT is making me smarter because it's the safest place for me to ask what I think are dumb questions. And it like it really, I'm not gonna lie it like kind of moved me because as someone who certainly has been afraid to speak up in a room or maybe has had imposter syndrome in the past, being able to have that safe place to learn and ask questions is extremely powerful, and I think that it's something that is that is overlooked when we're thinking about rolling out this technology. And just to your question, I think that anything that can increase your effectiveness can be used to cut costs. Or to get more stuff done and there are companies that are going to do both. There's no question it's not a tool that is only going to be used one way, but if you take like an extreme example, let's say you're a 10 person startup and you find a set of AI tools that can make every single person 10 times as effective. Are you gonna say, you know what, I'm gonna fire the other 9 and just do 10 people work with one person, you're gonna say we're gonna do the work of 100 people and we're gonna be able to move faster than everyone else. If you're a 10,000 person organization. You can say, well, I'm going to have 1000 people do 10,000 work, but if your competitor is saying no, we're going to have 100,000 people worth of work done, and so this is the line that Svea in the room is the first person I heard to say that she does not take credit for it, but it's a good line. AI is not going to take your job, but someone who uses AI will take your job, and that's the same for companies. We, you know, I've been saying I said this to the to the company last week at our all hands. AI is not going to take our customers, but other competitors who are moving faster, who are using AI will if we don't do it. And so that I think is, I think it's small, it's small thinking to say we're just going to use this to cut costs. Yeah, yeah. I want to come to the audience for a question, but I, I have one brief one for each, each of you, which is just what is one thing that these folks can do tomorrow to improve their prospects, reduce their anxiety, as we started off with around this topic. I could say one thing that that we did the bottoms up thing is is a big deal, but I think you need both sides. One of the other things that we did, and if none of you can do this for the whole company, even within your group, we spent a lot of time saying we want everyone to be using AI. We want to figure out the ways that it can make us more effective. And we weren't getting the kind of traction that we were hoping for and then we just made the decision a year ago to put someone in charge. So Hannah, Hannah Calhoun, who is an R&D leader, we just said Hannah, your full-time job is you are AI for Indeed, and she's responsible for working with every single function looking for those. Cases working with the bobs of the world to help popularize the work that's going on and to drive those outcomes. And so if you don't have, if, if the, if your approach is that everyone is responsible for it, then no one is responsible. So think about finding someone in your neck of the woods who can be responsible within your group for driving it, yeah. this might be a very meta answer, um, but I would say that you should open up Chat GPT and ask Chat GBT what are the first steps that you can do to learn this technology or how to even help people feel less anxious about the technology this is one of the things that that Chat GBT. is best at it's helping you get started if the area in front of you seems too large to tackle. And so I invite you to ask that question. I had a feeling I might be the answer for one of you. OK, let's go to the audience for a question, please. Yes, right there, sorry, forgive me. Your name and organization, please. Thank you. Yeah, hi, Kyle Forrest with Deloitte. One of the things with this uh session topic around workforce in the future that I'm really interested in both your perspectives on is the data that has come out recently that says this is the largest graduating high school class ever. Right, so actually then you play it out, there will be fewer humans in the workforce eventually and different types of roles and so I'd love to get, you know, perspective from each of you on even are we doing enough right now relative to how we reimagine those roles for the humans who are in the workforce around what those new jobs and tasks and activities for the humans will look like when you just look at the math equation of fewer humans and in certain types of roles. I guess I, I disagree and I'm maybe in the minority, but I disagree with the concept that there will be fewer people in the workforce. I know that it's a very popular opinion and there's some very important people in this world saying that the only job left at the end of all this AI stuff is going to be venture capitalist, might have been a venture capitalist who said that. I think we're going to go through a period though for the next couple of years where people are looking for ways to cut costs and the economy being as volatile and unpredictable as it is right now. And so we're going to see jobs slowing down and the hiring slowing down, and I think we're going to find just like we have with every other technological technological advancement of the last 400 years that we're going to be able to do so much more. I think, you know, I'm a tech guy in the software world. I think that less than 1% of the software that the world needs has been written. This is going to allow us to Move so much faster and solve so many bigger problems. So I think that the problem actually is we do have a shrinking labor force globally, and the question right now is I feel like we're in a race between the shrinking labor force and AI being able to help us catch up to actually solve all the problems that we need to catch up. But yeah, I agree, Chris, and I am, I am very bullish on the future of jobs. I think that. That what we're going to see in going back to the point about rebalancing is what types of skills are we looking for? I think that we're going to see a premium on people skills. This might be great, great news for the people in this room. Good news for everyone here, and you know, I think in some ways this when when the workforce and when companies are demanding that type of skill set, I think we might start to. Look at education and how are we preparing students to enter a workforce that is more dependent on people skills or problem solving skills in the in the physical world. So I I'm I'm really excited about that future. I think that that's a really exciting and optimistic future. Bullish on humanity. I like the way we've ended this, Chris, Julia, thank you so much. Wonderful conversation. Thank you. Take care.