WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

In this keynote session with the UK Government futurist Matthew Griffin discusses how technology is changing how companies hire, manage, and fire people, and how the workforce is changing for better and worse.

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Firstly, thank you to Lucy, the DWP strategy team, and Ministers at the HM Government Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) for asking me to be their honorary keynote where we discussed, among other topics, the future of the UK’s workforce and the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on jobs and knowledge economy workers.

Entitled the Future Workforce we had about twenty minutes, followed with a lengthy Q&A session, so in the interests of time I felt it prudent to zero in on three primary topics, namely future business models, automation upsides, and work from anywhere – all with twists.

Relax, rewind, and replay the keynote

During the first segment I discussed the rise of new business models that would have a direct impact on companies operations, got to market, and therefore hiring and employment strategies and these included the evolution of the gig economy, but also the emergence of distributed and autonomous organisation business models – the latter of which doesn’t need any employees to operate.

Next up was automation, and I showed how despite all the downsides we associate with automation, namely mass redundancies, one of the greatest upsides is the use of these same automation tools to unlock huge amounts of human potential and democratise access to skills. I also showed ministers the book that my son and I wrote in under 12 hours using the AI tools ChatGPT and MidJourney, and discussed the impact these and other technologies will have on jobs, hiring, training, re-skilling, the economy, and tax revenues.

Then finally I showed them how even surgeons and construction workers can do their jobs from the comfort of their own homes as new technologies such as 5G and robotics thrusts tele-operations into the spotlight – just to show them that when we talk about work from anywhere that doesn’t just apply to salesmen and women with laptops and a cellular connection any longer.