2003 William Raduchel

‘The intense interest being sparked by ChatGPT should be sounding alarm bells for many in the workforce’

Reflections on The Future of Work 2023 from WorkingNation Advisory Board member William J. Raduchel
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We asked our WorkingNation Advisory Board to share their thoughts on the most important issues and challenges facing the workforce and the labor market in the coming year.

William J. Raduchel is a strategic advisor at DMGT PLC, chairman of LiquidSky Software, a director of Cricket Media and LiveIntent, and chair of the executive advisory board at Originate.

Here are his thoughts on The Future of Work 2023.

“The intense interest being sparked by ChatGPT – an AI chatbot system released by OpenAI in November – in the media should be sounding alarm bells for many in the workforce. It has made the threat of AI suddenly real. Creatives are next on the line, as are all those jobs that serve as an interface between humans and systems. 

Technology continues to shrink the number of meaningful jobs while increasing the pool of humans seeking the remaining jobs. ChatGPT is not the first or the best of the artificial intelligence software out there, but it is good. Not only text, but now images, are generated by AI from simple text requests, so illustrator jobs are also at risk. Personalized appeals become trivial. Among the next to go are software developers as AI is getting skilled at generating actual code.

This was the underlying fear that motivated WorkingNation in the first place and, if nothing else, the pace of change and disruption is increasing. Recessions always spur cost-cutting initiatives. Technology seldom eliminates whole jobs. It just erodes them, and then economic pressures lead organizations to consolidate positions, so jobs disappear. Many of these workers will just leave the workforce, correctly seeing that they have few prospects for meaningful work. Are we making progress on this? No.  

There is blind faith in training, but training cannot provide innate skills and talents. Our brains develop over time and at various times, and there is no known process for redoing it later. Education focuses on what is taught, but what matters is what is learned. Universities have tenured faculty that are obsolete, teaching skills that are also obsolete. The rate at which our workforce is becoming obsolete is frightening. The great new clean energy jobs we anticipate are not the same jobs as are going away, and we may not have the skills distribution we need. Not everyone can be a brilliant software designer.

The most successful fiscal policy in our history was the Investment Tax Credit enacted under John F. Kennedy and conceived by the Nobel-prize-winning economist James Tobin, as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. Government cannot and will not solve this problem, but markets can. 

We need a sustainable jobs tax credit that rewards businesses for creating new, permanent positions. This is not simple, because job gains need to be long term and not created by a layoff. However, it can be done.”

You can read all The Future of Work 2023 articles from our WorkingNation Advisory Board here.

Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.