When it comes to our economic and business future, we keep asking the wrong question. Governments are setting up task forces to study “the future of jobs”. CEOs fund glossy campaigns about “the jobs of tomorrow”. Even the World Economic Forum issues its annual “Future of Jobs” report as if the idea of a job were a fixed star around which the economy will forever orbit. Yet the truth is more complex, and complicated.
The industrial-age job – a single employer, a stable title, a monthly salary – is losing its place as the organising unit of work. What lies ahead is not the end of work but the fragmentation of it. The future of work is not about jobs, it is about economic inclusion.
Three great forces are converging at once.
Intelligent automation is quietly redrawing what needs a human hand or mind. Robots and AI are no longer experiments in factories; they are the production line. The global stock of industrial robots has passed 4 million, and most are installed in Asia. South Korea leads the world in robot density. At the same time, generative AI has moved from novelty to infrastructure. Code is written by AI agents, who also can handle customer service, and back-office routines are disappearing into algorithms.
Forecasts differ on how many roles will vanish or emerge, but that’s the wrong metric. What matters is that the very bundles of tasks that once defined a “job” are dissolving faster than our institutions can adapt.
Meanwhile, the next generation of workers is rewriting the social contract. Gen Z and younger millennials are not allergic to work; they are allergic to the old deal. They want flexibility, meaning and multiple income streams. Across advanced economies, more than half of those under 30 say they expect to change roles or income sources every few years. They are building portfolios – contracting, freelancing, creating and investing – rather than climbing a single corporate ladder. Employer-tied benefits no longer fit lives that are deliberately multi-employer.
And as automation absorbs routine tasks, the human edge is shifting again. Creativity, judgment, empathy, collaboration and relationship-rich services are becoming the scarce resources of the 21st-century economy. Nations that keep training their people for yesterday’s production lines will produce yesterday’s workers for tomorrow’s world.
Taken together, these shifts mean that “the future of jobs” is a rear-view-mirror conversation. The forward-looking one is how to design systems that let people assemble work portfolios – fluid mixes of projects, micro-roles, learning bursts, entrepreneurship and civic contribution – while still protecting income, security and dignity.
For now, the numbers still look calm. The global panic about “AI taking our jobs” has not yet shown up in employment data. But in boardrooms, the anxiety is palpable. Goldman Sachs chief executive David Solomon recently conceded that companies are slowing the hiring process not because they are cutting costs, but because they are pausing to figure out how to use AI to automate and reinvest. The labour market is not collapsing; it is holding its breath.
That hesitation is measurable. In workshops I run on AI and prompt engineering, senior leaders confess the same dilemma: they want to keep their talent, but they can’t yet define what skills they’ll need in six months.
History warns what happens next. In past downturns, manufacturers used slow periods to re-engineer workflows around automation. When recovery came, the old jobs never returned. Economic pauses give companies space to absorb the disruption of new technology. This global hiring freeze may be that quiet pause before the storm – the prelude to a wave of AI-enabled restructuring that will redefine employment itself.
In parallel, we see and hear signals. Earlier this month, Amazon announced 14,000 job cuts, part of an expected reduction of up to 30,000 corporate jobs, or about 10 per cent of its corporate workforce as it cited over-hiring during the Covid-19 pandemic and embracing generative AI. Earlier this summer, Marc Benioff, the co-founder and CEO of Salesforce, stated that today’s chief executives would be the “last to lead a human-only workforce”.
The real question, then, is not whether technology destroys or creates jobs, but whether societies design for resilience or drift into jobless growth. We have a short window – perhaps three to five years – to lay the foundations for a work system that matches reality. That means shifting from degrees to demonstrable skills, from employer-locked perks to portable benefits, and from passive education to lifelong retraining.
Imagine national digital skills passports that record every verified micro-credential a person earns, or benefit wallets that carry health and retirement credits across multiple employers and platforms. Learning entitlements could guarantee every adult time and funds to retrain, linking tax breaks to the acquisition of real capabilities.
Governments can also shape how automation unfolds. Incentives should reward technologies that augment humans rather than replace them – AI that helps nurses triage patients, teachers prepare lessons, or inspectors detect safety anomalies. Small and medium-sized firms adopting robotics could receive matching grants if they commit to retraining displaced staff for higher-value roles. Sharing the productivity dividend is wiser than freezing innovation.
The future of work will still include jobs, but focusing only on jobs misses the bigger transformation. Businesses should start publishing “task maps” that show which roles AI will automate, augment or create within the next two years. They should treat reskilling as capital expenditure – an investment in the productive capacity of people. And hiring should prioritise curiosity, problem framing and systems thinking over narrow tool expertise.
This moment of uncertainty will not last. Either we use it to redesign how humans and machines collaborate, or we stumble into the next economic downturn unprepared and watch the displacement wave hit harder than it must.
We have about a thousand days (or three years if that sounds longer!) to turn this silence before the storm into a blueprint for a better kind of economy – one built not on the illusion of permanent jobs, but on the enduring promise of meaningful work.
