ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.
Most change happens slowly over time, giving people and organizations a moment to adjust. But sometimes when a bunch of new and big changes hit all at once, you have to respond more quickly. And that’s what seems to be happening in the world of work right now. As the rise of generative AI collides with other trends like hybrid and remote work, freelance and gig marketplaces and the use of blockchain and smart contracts, employers and employees are being forced to rethink how they do business.
Indeed, today’s guest says that we’re at a pivot point. Employment as we’ve known it for decades is poised for a massive overhaul. She’s here to explain all the ways that technology is decentralizing work, the resulting opportunities and risks, and how all of us can navigate this brave new world.
Deborah Perry Piscione is the cofounder and CEO of Work3 Institute and the coauthor of the book Employment Is Dead: How Disruptive Technologies Are Revolutionizing the Way We Work. Deborah, welcome.
DEBORAH PERRY PISCIONE: Thank you so much, Alison. Such a pleasure to be here, and such a profound transformation that we’re all facing right now.
ALISON BEARD: That title, Employment Is Dead, might have some people jumping for joy, maybe those who are already pretty entrepreneurial or hate corporate life, but it also sounds a little bit scary for those of us who don’t mind how work is working right now or are just afraid of this transformative change that you’re talking about. Do you really see a world in which, say a decade from now, we’re all operating differently than we did in the past?
DEBORAH PERRY PISCIONE: There’s this great quote, “A person can only understand the world the person can see.” Now we’ve got the introduction of not only artificial intelligence, but some of the Web3 technologies that are coming along that are going to make work transformational in so many ways, not just from the technological standpoint, but from the employee human standpoint. We certainly recognize that there’s going to be a certain percentage of the population that isn’t necessarily comfortable thinking of themselves as entrepreneurs and really want to be told what to do and then be able to go home to their families. But with the advancement of these disruptive technologies and the next generation, generation Z coming into the workforce who has already adopted these technologies, we are going to see the biggest transformation in work and the future of business of our lifetime.
ALISON BEARD: What are the biggest differences between what you see as traditional employment and this new future of work?
DEBORAH PERRY PISCIONE: You know, the traditional route was to go to college and then try to get a job and work your way up through the corporate ladder. Now, Alison, we’re almost seeing an inverted shift because this younger generation, not only is skills going to be the new currency, not the college degree, but now we’re going to learn more from the younger generation than the other way around; there’ll still be value for existing leadership and people of older generations. But now we’re at this place where we can see where you can make a sustainable living just by having a hyper gig economy and really acting upon the things that make you you, that make you human.
I’ve long advocated for the T-shape individual where perhaps your mainstay or your bread and butter of work is what you were educated in, where your skillset lies, but then the horizontal part of the T is all those other interesting passions that you may have that you can now authentically act upon and actually make a sustainable living on. What I mean is if you love to bake or you enjoy landscaping or you want to drive for Uber because you like the freedom of driving and not being in this control and command environment, you now can cobble together lots of ways of making a sustainable living.
ALISON BEARD: And so I mentioned a few of the big technological advancements that are driving this change. Which do you see as the most important in terms of the knock-on effects for how we work?
DEBORAH PERRY PISCIONE: So we have long desired to have this European lifestyle where we could take the month of August off, have shorter work days, shorter work weeks. Generative AI is going to give us the opportunity to do that where productivity is going to increase and we can now absolutely envision a two to three-day work week.
And the other driving force is that we are now getting this generation in who has been really indoctrinated into these not just generative AI, but these Web3 technologies such as the metaverse and digital twinning and other areas that are really going to play at the forefront of the future of work.
And what I mean by that is when you’re a young kid, particularly during the times of COVID, and you spent a lot of time on Roblox for example, that is the traditional metaverse that has really developed a whole new economy, whether you’re creating a game for Roblox, whether you are selling a digital item, this is just a whole new concept of what we think about the future of work and the future of business.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, and I guess the rise of the influencer economy plays into that too. So, you see how the new generation is already prepared for this future. How should employers get ready for it?
DEBORAH PERRY PISCIONE: That is the million-dollar question or the billion-dollar question because this is such a shift. It’s going to be a much more collaborative process in terms of rather than the employer-employee relationship, we are starting to move towards a much more balanced approach where the employer is actually a partner in the process, as is the employee. And we’re looking at the skillset of where people are now and how to help them upskill or be taught into ways that business can become more efficient.
ALISON BEARD: It seems like everyone is talking about generative AI. People have familiarity with the metaverse and certainly gig marketplaces, but you also talk about some lesser known technological developments that employers and employees need to be thinking about like DAOs and blockchains and smart contracts. Talk us through those elements of how organizations are changing that maybe aren’t as top of mind for all of us.
DEBORAH PERRY PISCIONE: You know, the blockchain has been around. As we look at issues in cybersecurity and the increasing threats, but from a large enterprise standpoint, I think that corporations, larger enterprises will start to look to house things on the blockchain and where blockchain, DAOs, smart contracts really come into play where you can be a individual who has a great passion working on a project in Sweden or something else going on in Hong Kong.
And everything gets done through a smart contract so there is no manager overseeing you, and then you have a DAO, this decentralized autonomized organization, where decisions are made through this DAO of people voting. So it’s a much more collaborative process where people are getting engaged based on the work that they actually love to do versus the 85% of work that they traditionally don’t like to do. It really gives you an opportunity to reimagine what work and your contribution and your value can look like.
ALISON BEARD: And there are all these structures that enable you to more seamlessly set a career up this way and enable organizations to more easily operate this way?
DEBORAH PERRY PISCIONE: Yeah, you know, it’s going to be very much a transitional shift that will do in chunks, if you will. Nothing’s going to happen at once. At first, there is going to be the adoption around generative AI with enterprises. And one of the areas of concern right now is certainly the cost for enterprises to be able to bring in gen AI at the level that it needs to.
There’s also the concern about enterprises’ data where it currently is and whether that data can effectively support gen AI to be optimized, but this is the direction we’re initially heading. Then we’re going to come to the realization that one individual can start to do the job of three or four other individuals. Simultaneously, we will be bringing in this next version of the internet powered by the blockchain and other technologies and looking at ways where everything from manufacturing to supply chain can be optimized by things such as digital twinning.
And digital twinning, if the audience is not familiar, is really part of the metaverse where in real time you can figure out everything from manufacturing to supply chain to operationally where items need to be on the shelves based on a particular event happening in that community. And it’s all set up digitally before you actually act on it.
So there’s companies out there such as BMW and Lowe’s have really, really capitalized off of digital twinning before they actually go into manufacturing that has been enormously productive and a huge cost saver. All of this is hitting us all at once and freeing up workers to focus on other tasks and creativity and innovation.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, it sounds like you’re saying that both employees and employers need to approach different pieces of this one at a time. It’s generative AI for the cost savings and then potentially moving into metaverse and digital twinning as your workforces expand and become more decentralized and globally, and then it’s maybe moving to those autonomous operating units. But it can definitely feel like a lot to get your head around. I know you have lots of great examples of tech companies doing it or really large, well-funded organizations like BMW or Lowe’s, but do you really see this transitioning happening across the board for companies particularly in more traditional industries?
DEBORAH PERRY PISCIONE: They’re going to have to because, really, being able to attract talent, you want to make sure that you’re adopting a new mindset. And in the book, we talk about the 10 operating principles of what we call Work3; and it’s a play on Web3. We want to talk about having a partnership. We want transparency. Individuals want autonomy and ownership, they want to be part of the decision-making process, they want to be able to have flexibility, so all of these things come into play.
And if you’re not on the bandwagon of adopting an integrating generative AI, you are going to lose out. And certainly there’s early adopters, there’s that sliding scale, that whether it’s an individual adopting technology or enterprise, you go from this place of you don’t need this, everything is fine and good as is, but eventually you get to the other side of that I can’t imagine how I live without it. And so it’s really critical for those who are in leadership roles and those board of directors to recognize how fast this is all hitting us and how quickly we need to move to adopt generative AI and other technologies into the workforce and the workplace.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. And it does sound like obviously all those things you talked about, transparency, flexibility, autonomy are all great for people and organizations, but there are also downsides to not having a steady job or a stable workforce. So how do you ensure that as you’re making these changes, you’re ensuring that the benefits are outweighing the risks?
DEBORAH PERRY PISCIONE: That’s such a great question, and I get asked this quite a bit. And the reality is we have to go back to our education, and that’s a whole different conversation, but we’re not set up to be very risk-tolerant. In fact, we are really learning how to be risk-adverse, staying within the lines, not coloring beyond it. And if you’re a little bit on the exterior of those lines, you’re considered an outcast or unique. It’s something that we need to start from the beginning. I always say, “You’re not born to be risk-adverse.”
And so, in this environment, the more that you can adapt an entrepreneurial mindset, the more you’re going to protect yourself from the ups and downs of this type of career. But at the end of the day, there is no loyalty or guarantee like there was back in the 1950s, so you have to ebb and flow. Recognize who you are as an individual, bring all your talents and passions to the potential of bringing it not to the table, but also offering yourself the opportunity to explore various businesses or take on various projects as a way to subsidize income.
I, myself, despite my professional success, my boys had started a dog-sitting business many, many years ago. They went off to college. And we realized we couldn’t say goodbye to these dogs that we have gotten to know, so now we’ve adopted this dog-sitting business because we love these dogs so much. You have to recognize, despite your graduate degree and all your professional success, there is this opportunity to really bring all of you to the forefront in terms of subsidence and making a sustainable living.
ALISON BEARD: Does this mean that all of us are going to be constantly job switching and training and learning how to do new things?
DEBORAH PERRY PISCIONE: You know, if you don’t continuously evolve in this environment, there’s going to be hundreds of other people who have already adopted where the world is heading. And so that’s the real risk is, as an individual, you really need to start thinking ahead. Look, there will be an adoption timeline. And we’re not going to adopt generative AI and all these other technologies into the workforce tomorrow, but then again, there’s an entire new generation that’s coming in that already knows exactly what to do, is upskilled and continuously practices these new skills and technologies on a daily basis.
And as employers start to bring in gen AI at much larger engagements, we are going to come to this realization that people are going to lose their jobs. That’s just the reality. And so you’ve got to take it upon yourself to realize that I may not want to be learning new things, but the alternative is it’s going to be very, very difficult to stay in that current role unless not only you’re current, but you’re thinking about the future.
ALISON BEARD: So what is the end result for individual workers? It’s that you cobble together a bunch of different jobs and then you have more leisure time also?
DEBORAH PERRY PISCIONE: Yeah, that’s the great benefit of where we’re heading. And we can now envision actually adopting life stage flexibility. And so if you’re a recent college grad and you want to be in an office for five days a week, you can actually work a much shorter workday. And that’s just going to be incredible for commuting and other benefits that will come along of not having everybody working the same hours on the road at the same time. But the flip side is if you have a newborn at home and you only want to work two days a week, again, we have to get into this mindset of outcome and productivity rather than time in the office. And so that’s going to be an enormous benefit of these new technologies coming into the workplace.
ALISON BEARD: And you think that we can all still find the same stability that we found in traditional employment with this new system because employers are going to get on board too.
DEBORAH PERRY PISCIONE: No, not necessarily stability. If anything, there’s going to be a lot of uncertainty moving forward. But the stability has to be in the retraining of how we think about ourselves and how we think about how we make a living. It is going to be quite frightening for a lot of people. And this has nothing to do with generations necessarily, this is really, you could be 72 years old and be incredibly scrappy and entrepreneurial and will survive far better than someone who’s in their 30s who has been schooled, if you will, into understanding that you get a job and that job’s always going to be there for you, because it’s not. Every industry is going to be affected by generative AI in particular.
And specific industries will benefit greatly by bringing in the metaverse, digital twinning, blockchain, smart contracts, DAOs the workplace that is going to be able to cut out people and recognize that the whole org chart is going to change by having these AI agents and Copilots at our side. It can take over the entire organizational chart if a board of directors decided that they wanted to do so.
ALISON BEARD: Okay, let’s shift to that organizational perspective. How should boards and C-suite leaders be thinking about making this transition quickly and effectively?
DEBORAH PERRY PISCIONE: Well, as a board of director myself, you’re always concerned about profitability and organizational effectiveness. We’re going to see this in stages as well. We’re going to see first where gen AI can start to cut headcount and continue to have even higher levels of productivity, and then we’re going to start to test out whether we can remove managers through the blockchain, through smart contracts, through DAOs. I occasionally get the question, “Can AI take over the role of A CEO?” And the short answer is yes, absolutely. Then you’re not dealing with the discrepancy between a comp pay, between that CEO and that worker on the front line, that enormous discrepancy in pay and benefits that we see now. You will have an AI who can work 24/7 who doesn’t complain, who doesn’t call out sick, who doesn’t take out vacation.
And so there’s going to be a lot of experimentation. I think boards of directors are going to play a much larger role in the organization overall, and we’re going to see different roles such as the chief artificial intelligence officer, the CIOs. And even CHROs I think are going to be a critical, critical element moving forward in determining this very transformational and profound shift in organizations.
ALISON BEARD: So it sounds like you’re saying the managers are going to create a new org chart that maybe eliminates them and also some of the workforce. How exactly do you see that happening in reality?
DEBORAH PERRY PISCIONE: Well, I think there’s going to be a lot of tinkering, to be honest, just to see how things work. If there is adoption, I don’t think we’re going to see as rapid of adoption with smart contracts and DAOs, but that’s really how you do start to eliminate managers, and then seeing more of a decentralized work opportunity.
For a while, we’re going to see this bifurcated work track. You’re going to see traditional work trying to enterprise as adopting AI, and then you’ve got this secondary track that you’ll see a lot of gen Z already adopting where they have figured out how to make sustainable living through having a portfolio career, or they’re doing a lot of different things at once. And skills will come in and out depending on where their interests are in any given time.
A couple years ago, Alison, we saw in Silicon Valley where software engineers were so in demand and that starting salaries were astronomical at companies like Google and Apple and Meta, Nvidia battling for these individuals. Now we see what’s happening with Anthropic where you can actually code through AI. And so this is really hitting us very quickly. We need to wake up. The companies that adopt and tinker and experiment as fast as possible will make some mistakes, they may fail, but they’ll be able to recover because of gen AI. We are learning as we go. We are flying the plane as we’re building it.
ALISON BEARD: Are there some really good examples or case studies you would point to of companies that you think are doing this well right now at a larger, more intense scale that’s beyond just gen AI experiments, for example?
DEBORAH PERRY PISCIONE: Well, I think the companies themselves in the gen AI space are the ones that are starting to dictate what other startups can come along and capitalize off the technologies that the Nvidias, the Googles, the Metas, the Anthropics are starting to provide. The greatest use case is that we may have that company of one or that company of three that becomes a billion-dollar company because you can utilize the ChatGPTs and the Anthropics of the world or the Geminis of the world to really be able to have a workforce be that genAI copilot and an agent. And that’s what’s going to be really fascinating is the future of the company of one.
ALISON BEARD: So what are the biggest hurdles that we need to overcome both as individuals and as organizations to get to this new and exciting future you’re talking about?
DEBORAH PERRY PISCIONE: I think the biggest hurdle lies right now with the enterprise. And there is concern for the state of data that larger enterprises have in order for gen AI to be the most effective. But from an individual standpoint, we really do need to upskill.
ALISON BEARD: And how should leaders start having conversations about these shifts that are necessary and coming whether we like it or not with their employees?
DEBORAH PERRY PISCIONE: The most critical element is having a collaborative dialogue with your people. People have got to be brought together on this journey and talking about step-by-step what’s going to happen. Enormous transparency has got to take place and there’s got to be a time every week where people can ask questions, because you can’t do a strategic plan without addressing the people element, the headcount of it.
So if you know six to nine months out where the adoption rate is happening with gen AI and other technologies, you know that eventually you’re going to start to have to replace people. And so you’ve got to give people the opportunity to be able to upskill or move on. You’re either on this train or you’re off. And so you’ve got to ask yourself, as an individual, where do I want to sit on this train that’s moving very fast?
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. Just walk me through what you think a typical workday would look like, or a workweek would look like for, say, a journalist like me in… I probably shouldn’t be a journalist; it should be something more relatable for our audience. For a management consultant in the future.
DEBORAH PERRY PISCIONE: Well, that management consultant is going to be the one helping in the transition. You know, you may open up your computer or your phone, and a project may come in through the blockchain and a DAO because you were recommended or rated on a particular site. And you will decide whether you want to engage in that project. And there’s other circumstances where you may be asked to write a report or a strategic plan, and you can go and turn to gen AI and have it come up with a pretty decent plan in a matter of seconds to minutes.
And you’re going to spend time reviewing that strategic plan and adjusting it to better fit what the objective is. Then you may go for a run. You may attend to your garden a bit and then come back to work to whatever it is that you need to be able to achieve that day.
ALISON BEARD: And then take a vacation.
DEBORAH PERRY PISCIONE: Oh, yeah. Well, you can work anywhere, any place at any time throughout the world. And that’ll be another major shift, whether we continue to have home fronts that we’ve only known. You look at this next generation who is either putting off marriage and kids entirely, or certainly postponing, and they could be anywhere in the world doing anything they want to do and be able to make a living to afford to be able to do that.
ALISON BEARD: Terrific. Well, thank you, Deborah. As someone who’s a little wary of some of these changes, I really appreciate you helping me wrap my head around them.
DEBORAH PERRY PISCIONE: Thank you. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
ALISON BEARD: That’s Deborah Perry Piscione, cofounder and CEO of Work3 Institute and co-author of the book, Employment Is Dead: How Disruptive Technologies Are Revolutionizing the Way We Work.
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