Podcast3

Workforce disruption: disappearing jobs vs. disappearing tasks

A conversation with Benjamin Pring, director, Cognizant Center for the Future of Work
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Robots are taking your jobs! Maybe. Maybe not.

“The whole notion of jobs being destroyed by AI is pretty hot. It’s been around for quite a while. In fact, the Oxford University study suggested 47 percent of jobs are going to be wiped out by AI is over six years old. We don’t quite take that apocalyptic kind of dystopian view of things,” Benjamin Pring, director of Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work, tells me in this week’s episode of Work in Progress.

Pring and I recently met up at Talent Forward 2019, the national workforce conference held by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation in Washington each year.

The Center for the Future of Work does original research and analysis on work trends caused by evolving technology. I asked him whether or not he thinks robots, AI, and other new technologies will lead to wholesale destruction of the workforce in the next few years.

Pring says it’s true — new technologies developed over the decades have historically displaced jobs. But slowly. And it is also true — they have created many more jobs that didn’t exist before the new technologies were created.

He argues that when you look at workforce disruption you have to separate the notion of disappearing jobs from disappearing tasks.

“Ten to 12 percent of jobs will go away. Ten to 13 percent of new jobs will be created. But the vast bulk of jobs — 75 percent — will be the same, but they will be using this next-generation technology to do that work faster, more efficiently, more productively, more profitably, and, hopefully, more enjoyably.”

Benjamin Pring, Director of Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work, speaking at the Talent Forward 2019 conference in Washington, D.C. (Photo: USCCF)

The discussion eventually turned to what happens to the older workers with skills that are no longer needed in the workforce? What happens to them as jobs become more dependent on AI and other new technologies?

Pring and I agree these are the toughest questions in the whole future of work debate. He has some very interesting thoughts on the subject and it is worth hearing them for yourself.

You can listen to this episode Work in Progress here on WorkingNation.com, or you can download the podcast (and subscribe to all the Work in Progress podcasts) wherever you get your podcasts.

We hope you enjoy the conversation.

In next week’s podcast, also from Talent Forward 2019, I speak with Gayatri Agnew, senior director for Walmart and part of the company’s Social Responsibility Team. She leads strategy and partnerships on economic mobility, specifically human capital, shared value, partnerships, and philanthropy.

Episode 114: Benjamin Pring, Director, Cognizant Center for the Future of Work
Host: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNation
Producer: Larry Buhl
Executive Producers: Joan Lynch, Melissa Panzer, and Ramona Schindelheim
Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0.

You can check out all the other podcasts at this link: Work in Progress podcasts

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.