🔮 Rise of Exponential Orgs, 🔑 Candidate Experiences, 🌎 Global Attitudes on AI, 🏔️ GenZ Expectations vs Reality
Weekly top news and insights on the future of work
👋 Welcome to this week’s edition!
Top news and insights from this week we’re covering today:
🔮 Adapting to AI: Exponential Organizations
🔑 Candidate Experience: 2023 Key Pain Points
💸 Accenture Invests 3$bn into AI
🏔️ Expectation vs Reality: The Hard Hand Dealt Young People in 2023
🛣️ Freelancer Journey: A Guide
🌎 Visualizing Global Attitudes towards AI
Enjoy and please don’t forget to share and subscribe if you haven’t already! 💫
🔮 Adapting to AI: Exponential Organizations
Great piece by Josh Berkin on how organizations are going to change with the power of AI.
Key takeaways:
GDP per Capita has been increasing almost exponentially - if this was a measure for productivity, it would mean we are going to keep extracting more and more value from each individual worker, which Josh argues is going to become a ‘super-worker’.
Companies have an opportunity to reduce bureaucracy through AI
Organizations are going to get smaller through time. Another case for the ‘Exponential Organization’
"An Exponential Organization is one whose impact or output is disproportionately large -- at least 10 times larger -- compared to its peers because of new organizational techniques that leverage accelerating technologies. In other words, it grows faster, bigger and cheaper than its competition because it has a Massive Transformative Purpose and scales as quickly as tech does."
Why it matters:
Is this a real measure of productivity? And how do we deal with wages not following the same trend lines?
Read more here.
🔑 Candidate Experience: 2023 Key Pain Points
Interesting report by Phenom that tries to capture which parts of the candidate experience companies are getting right: Attraction, Engagement, Conversion and AI.
Key Takeaways:
Clearly, the only sufficient part of the experience is Engagement, while Attraction and Conversion are very poor on average.
Some of the lowest scores:
15% of career sites had a consistent branded application process.
28% of companies had curated social media content embedded within the career site.
5% of career sites featured curated Glassdoor employee reviews.
Why it matters:
There is an urgent need to redefine, and draw a need candidate experience. I’ve always been an advocate of bringing the approach that is used by Digital Marketers into HR - the two worlds are more and more similar.
Read more here.
💸 Accenture Invests 3$bn into AI
Key Takeaways:
Accenture will expand its Data & AI practice to offer new industry solutions and pre-built models
Also launches AI Navigator for Enterprise platform to guide AI strategy, use cases, rigorous business cases, decision-making and responsible policies; and Center for Advanced AI to help maximize value of generative and other AI
Will double AI talent to 80,000 people through hiring, acquisitions and training
Why it matters:
Accenture claims over the next 10 years AI will rule over 40% of our day-to-day work lives, and clearly wants to establish a strong foothold for enterprise consulting. I can already picture the PowerPoint blood flowing.
🏔️ Expectation vs Reality: The Hard Hand Dealt Young People in 2023
Key Takeaways:
There is growing disparity between the optimistic vision of prosperity and leisure for young people in the 21st century, as envisioned by economist John Maynard Keynes, and the bleak reality faced by young people in 2023.
Despite increased productivity and technological advancements, young people today are stressed, depressed, indebted, and alienated, with little economic reward for their hard work.
The young workforces are working more hours (and earlier in their lives) than ever before, but receiving less in return.
Young people rely heavily on debt, particularly students who accumulate debt for education but find themselves trapped by interest payments.
There is growing erosion of institutions and support networks for young people, such as rising university tuition fees, privatization of essential services, and shrinking social safety nets, making life more expensive and less secure for the younger generation.
Why it matters:
Always great to talk about AI and productivity, but what about real-life effects and dynamics that we’ve already seen through the technological and market advances up until today?
Read more here.
🛣️ Freelancer Journey: A Guide
Rowena from RemoteWorkDigest lays out an interesting piece on freelancing.
Key Takeaways:
60% more professionals joined the freelance revolution as full-time freelancers, or as side-giggers moonlighting on off hours
Estimates suggest over 65 million freelancers in the US alone, and globally they make up 47% of the global workforce.
There are four stages to a Freelance Journey - they can be very challenging
Why it Matters:
Freelancing has changed a lot through the years: it’s a growing trend on both sides of the table, for both companies and for individuals as a source of income.
There is historically little or no interest to provide education, training and support for freelancers, but it’s going to be a key service to level-up quality of the services provided and support this growth.
Read more here.
🌎 Visualizing Global Attitudes towards AI
This infographic visualizes survey data from market research firm, Ipsos, to see how attitudes towards AI varies by country.
Key Takeaways:
By including each country’s GDP per capita, we can see that wealthier populations are more skeptical about products and services that use the technology.