Future of Work Bryant

‘We need a massive retraining of the workforce, certainly the bottom half of it, to be able to manage AI machines’

Reflections on the big issues shaping our workforce in the coming year from our WorkingNation Advisory Board
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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 2024.

John Hope Bryant is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Operation HOPE, the largest nonprofit provider of financial literacy, financial inclusion, and economic empowerment tools and services in the United States for youth and adults.

Here are his thoughts on The Future of Work 2024.

“In order to make sure that low-skilled and medium-skilled workers and working-class people and working middle-class people and working poor don’t get left behind in the AI revolution, we really have to take, as the theme of our Hope Global Forum this year, a case for optimism.

“You’ve got to see the glass as half full and not half empty. When you’re being run out of town, get in front of the crowd and make it like a parade. So we’ve got to… don’t complain about AI, artificial intelligence. Don’t whine about it. It’s here whether you like it or not. It’s been coming here for several years, as I’ve been noting in my interviews that I’ve been doing.

“If you went to CVS or Walgreens or a grocery store or, in some cases, even a department store, you saw these automated devices in the fast food restaurants taking your order, parts of your order. There are people there, but that was major corporations trying to get you used to the coming AI revolution using automation and a little robotics. And so you’re going to see a speeding up of that.

“We need a massive retraining of the workforce, certainly the bottom half of it, to be able to manage AI machines. We need a massive upgrading of education, which is probably a good thing anyway.

“America needs to be a massively educated economy in the 21st century. We can’t have people running around with high school educations in the largest economy on the planet as a norm and expect that to work. So college has to become the new high school and specialized skills have to become the new college. And when we do that, and we will, and we realize we’re better together, Black and white, rich and poor, women joining men, we’ll realize we’re better together.

“We realize the new colors are actually not black or white, or red or blue, it’s green as in the color of U.S. currency. And that I think will pop GDP. We’ll do this retraining, this reinvestment. We get behind artificial intelligence – make it a force for good in the world, lead the rest of the world. And I think that we’ll grow the economy as a result of that. All boats, ultimately, I believe, will rise.”

The working class will be left behind in the AI revolution without massive retraining

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. John Hope Bryant is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Operation HOPE, the largest nonprofit provider of financial literacy, financial inclusion, and economic empowerment tools and services in the United States for youth and adults.

Watch John Hope Bryant on The Future of Work 2024

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.