The Impact of AI on Work (Isn't About Jobs)
Why industries reshape first - and what that means for you. Join our free Work 3 Webinar on Thursday 16 October to explore this shift.
Reid Hoffman the Co-founder of LinkedIn recently said,
“AI is going to reshape every industry and every job.”
Where is the ‘best’ evidence for how AI will change work?
Quotes from the owners of tech companies, manager surveys, vendor forecasts, case studies from past technologies, task-based academic analyses…
Each reveals something, yet none can predict the path ahead.
Most debates start with the wrong question: the impact of AI on jobs.
But our systems of work are broader than payroll - today around two billion people work without a formal job. The frame matters.
This article sets the scene for our next free Work 3 Webinar on Thursday 16 October, where we’ll unpack these themes together and explore what they mean for different industries and roles. Details at the end.
Restructuring Industries First, Not Jobs
Before AI changes what we do day-to-day, it will reshape the industries and organisations we work in. We’re tempted to play with a tool, replace a task, and then extrapolate to the global labour market. That’s backwards.
In previous waves we didn’t forecast the spreadsheet by tallying clerical tasks; we watched publishing, travel, and music reorganise around new technologies. Expect the same again.
Carlota Perez’s long-wave pattern shows new technologies first disrupt capital, industries, and organisational structures before settling into a “golden age”.
AI is still in the turbulent re-wiring phase.
Unbundling Work from Jobs
AI accelerates a trend we’ve tracked at Work 3: work is unbundling from traditional employment.
Tasks, skills, and capabilities are modularising, verified via digital credentials, and traded across global talent networks. With agents and platforms, capabilities - not job titles - become the unit of exchange.
Power shifts among workers, platforms, and firms.
This didn’t start with AI, but AI will amplify it.
Redesigning Organisations
Firms, especially in knowledge industries will look smaller and be more permeable.
When it’s easier to find and orchestrate capability, there’s less need to own it inside the firm boundary. AI systems and agents become part of workflows and decision rights.
“Super-operators” - people who adopt and adapt tools faster than their organisations- become disproportionately valuable.
Layers of management shift; orchestration and oversight roles grow; the boundary between “inside” and “outside” talent blurs.
Shifting Skills and Human Agency
As AI takes on more routine and cognitive tasks, the human differentiators become judgment, ethics, creativity, and orchestration.
AI should be seen not as a competitor but as a co-pilot. The challenge is building trustable, ethical, explainable AI tools — and the human capabilities to work alongside them.
Work identities will shift. We’ll need fewer task-doers and more sense-makers, able to frame problems, interrogate AI outputs, and design workflows that combine human and machine strengths.
We’ll dig deeper into these shifts — including how different organisations are adapting — in our live Work 3 Webinar on 16 October.
Rewriting the Social Contract for Work
All these changes point to a deeper shift in the social contract that underpins work - between individuals, firms, and the state.
The 20th-century life model - study for 20 years, work for 45, then retire - is collapsing. What replaces it depends on the choices we make now.
As employment erodes as the dominant container, we’ll need new arrangements for income security, continuous learning, identity, and representation.
We can drift to fragmentation - or design something more inclusive.
Thinking, fast and slow
Predictions about how many jobs AI will “create” or “destroy” miss the point.
The impact of AI will be combined, corrupted and cajoled with the other Mega Trends Driving Our Work, from the changing workforce to geo-political shifts, to the transformation of organisations in response to industry restructuring.
The impact is structural, not arithmetic.
AI - really the tail of a digital revolution that began in the 1970s - will interact with organisational architecture, labour markets, and other mega trends to reframe work: unbundling jobs into capabilities, weaving freelancers, platforms, and autonomous agents into production, and rewarding those who can orchestrate the whole.
The future of work is not something handed down by economists, consultants, or tech companies.
It’s something we build.
That’s exactly the conversation we’ll be having at our free Work 3 Webinar on 16 October. We’d love you to join us and bring your perspective.
The real question is: what kind of work future do you want to design?
I have included some quotes from my speech this week in Lisbon with the CRF, who I thank for inviting me to take part in such an interesting discussion.
Join Our Work 3 Webinar
🗓 Thursday 16 October · 6pm BST (UK) / 1pm EDT (US)
We’ll unpack the ideas in this article — from industry restructuring to the future social contract — and open the floor for your questions and perspectives.
Sign up for free here →
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Let us know what you think in the comments, and try and join us on the Webinar.
Thinking slower,