People Powered By Ai The Future Of Your Workforce Forbes

Daniel is an entrepreneur, founder & CEO of MyOutDesk devoted to providing growing companies with proven, reliable virtual assistants. It’s official: AI has gone mainstream. And the numbers prove it: 71% of organizations regularly use gen AI (up from just 33% in 2023), making the adoption of this technology among the fastest in the history of mankind. As someone in the business of people, I often get asked where a company like mine, one that provides growing companies with virtual assistants, belongs in an era dominated by AI. The answer is, AI enhances what we do, but it doesn’t replace the value of real human relationships. If you see AI as a tool rather than a threat, it can unlock countless opportunities to bring more humanity to your workforce—one that increasingly operates through digital screens.

Like most tech revolutions before it, the use of AI started as a grassroots effort—and has been adopted by more employees than many leaders realize. It’s a bottom-up pattern of adoption that has CEOs around the world increasing investments in AI, but there’s a delta in what they’re contributing and what they’re getting credit for. Srikanth Karra is Chief Human Resources Officer at Mphasis. Proclamations have been made for a few years now about the emergence of a smart new technology—artificial intelligence—that would alter life as we know it. Today, that moment has arrived, and its presence underlies nearly everything. As with most new developments, AI is more visible in some industries than others.

In particular, it's vastly transforming software development and tech companies. Still, AI's presence and continued adoption in the workplace causes uncertainty. People have expressed apprehensions about its possible impact on jobs and how it could potentially overpower all that is human about work. As someone who's been driven by bringing out the best in people in diverse work environments over decades, I find it important to say AI may be the technology that helps free up employees... Its ability to automate some processes, thereby reducing mindless tasks, promises to restore an expanded capacity to the workforce in ways that may prove to be significant and historic. One of the valuable outcomes AI makes possible is the automation of routine tasks and processes.

According to a Salesforce survey, up to 89% of full-time employees said automation made their jobs more satisfying. Additionally, 91% said they found automation saved time and helped them develop a better work-life balance. Is AI poised to automate all human work — or will it bring us more meaningful, higher-paying jobs? It depends who you ask. Tech CEOs have warned of a coming tidal wave. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman expects artificial general intelligence to surpass humans at all economically valuable tasks. Some economists see a slower story. MIT’s Daron Acemoglu estimates that AI will increase U.S. productivity by just 0.05% annually over the next decade — based on the idea that most companies won’t change how they operate. Predicting exactly how AI will reshape jobs might be impossible. But if you’re leading a business, your priority isn't knowing precisely who’s correct — it’s preparing your organization and workforce for an AI-driven future.

But why is forecasting AI’s impact on jobs so difficult, even for experts? Understanding the forces that make it hard to predict is also what helps leaders understand how to prepare. When a CEO tells his team, "AI is coming for your jobs, even mine," you pay attention. It is rare to hear that level of blunt honesty from any leader, let alone the head of one of the world's largest freelance platforms. Yet this is exactly how Fiverr co-founder and CEO Micha Kaufman has chosen to guide his company through the most significant technological shift of our lifetimes. His blunt assessment: AI is coming for everyone's jobs, and the only response is to get faster, more curious, and fundamentally better at being human.

Kaufman doesn't apologize for his directness. As someone who's built four companies over 25 years and took Fiverr public seven years ago, he's developed a communication style that prioritizes authenticity over comfort. When asked why he chose such a stark message, Kaufman explained, "If you stand in the middle of the road and you see a car coming to run you over, it's probably better to... His perspective stems from a fundamental belief about leadership. "You should have radical transparency. You should just say things for what they are," Kaufman told me.

He acknowledges uncertainty about the future, noting that while he's confident in his views about AI's trajectory, he's not presumptuous enough to claim certainty about exactly how things will unfold. The message resonated beyond Fiverr. Months after Kaufman's internal memo, Sam Altman gave an interview making a similar point, suggesting that AI would eventually surpass even the best CEOs alive today. The convergence of these warnings from leaders building and using AI systems suggests we're facing a genuine inflection point. Kaufman frames our current moment with AI through a compelling historical analogy. "What's happening with AI right now is in many ways similar to what happened in 1769 with the steam engine," he explains.

When compact steam engines first appeared, the obvious solution was to attach them to horse carriages. It made perfect sense at the time, but it wasn't revolutionary. The true transformation came later with the actual automobile. While ChatGPT and generative AI dominate headlines, a quieter revolution is unfolding in AI-powered robotics, transforming businesses and reshaping industries. Far from science fiction, these intelligent machines are automating tasks, boosting efficiency, and sparking debates about their impact on jobs. AI robots fuse artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, with physical hardware to execute tasks autonomously or alongside humans.

Unlike traditional robots limited to rigid, pre-programmed routines, AI robots adapt to unpredictable environments, learning from data to navigate challenges. Imagine a warehouse bot weaving through clutter, a retail robot answering customer queries, or a humanoid assembling intricate parts. These machines blend cognitive power with physical precision. Their rise reflects businesses’ need to boost efficiency, enhance safety, and meet surging demands, particularly in e-commerce and industrial sectors. AI robots combine artificial intelligence with physical hardware to perform tasks autonomously or collaboratively with humans. Unlike traditional robots programmed for repetitive actions, AI robots leverage machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing to adapt, learn, and navigate complex environments.

The global robotics market is surging, driven by AI advancements, labor shortages, and the push for automation. Estimates place the market at $53.2 billion in 2024, with projections ranging from $74 billion to over $90 billion by 2026, and as high as $178.7 billion by 2033. Businesses are adopting these robots to cut costs, improve safety, and meet rising consumer demands, especially in e-commerce, manufacturing, and logistics. Artificial intelligence is advancing at breakneck speed. The big question is how long it will take until technology dominates the job market. You should start thinking about your own career.

Will you be caught up in the change? With the U.S. navigating a $36 trillion debt, tariff tensions, and economic uncertainty, the specter of disruption from AI adds urgency for workers to protect themselves. Artificial intelligence is expected to fundamentally transform the global workforce by 2050, according to reports from PwC, McKinsey, and the World Economic Forum. Estimates suggest that up to 60% of current jobs will require significant adaptation due to AI. Automation and intelligent systems will become an integral part of the workplace.

o remain competitive, invest in skills like critical thinking and digital fluency. Target AI-resilient sectors like healthcare or education. Advocate for retraining programs to reinvent your career. As macro investor and founder of the Bridgewater hedge fund Ray Dalio warns, the economy’s future hinges on balancing AI’s power with human potential. He says those who prepare now will shape the world of tomorrow. Estimates vary, but experts converge on a transformative window of 10 to 30 years for AI to reshape most jobs.

A McKinsey report projects that by 2030, 30% of current U.S. jobs could be automated, with 60% significantly altered by AI tools. Goldman Sachs predicts up that to 50% of jobs could be fully automated by 2045, driven by generative AI and robotics. Organizations are embracing advanced technologies powered by artificial intelligence (AI) with Generative AI (GenAI) tools becoming increasingly accessible to the modern workforce. According to Deloitte’s latest quarterly executive survey, State of Generative AI in the Enterprise, just under 40% of the workforce gained access to GenAI tools over the past year. As the workforce continues leveraging GenAI capabilities, and the underlying large language models (LLMs) to generate content at a prompt, AI agents capable of reasoning are being utilized to support end-to-end transactional work, analysis,...

Foundation models help enable users to “chat” with data for generating content, code, and some level of insight. The evolution of foundational LLMs to advanced reasoning models have opened new gateways of opportunities for Agentic AI, empowering AI agents to play a more significant and impactful role. AI agents are autonomous software systems endowed with reasoning capabilities to process large volumes of data, comprehend context, reason logically, design complete workflows by interfacing with other systems and undertake actions including executing tasks. When multiple AI agents are put together to form a multiagent system, these AI agents can help revolutionize how processes are automated and analyzed, often leading to faster processes. These AI agents can interact and collaborate when tailored to the specific needs and complexities of processes—handling sophisticated tasks and improving overall efficiency. Many aspects of enterprise architecture can be elevated, going beyond mere automation of current processes and tasks, to fundamentally reimagining and improving them.

Modern enterprise workflows follow a relatively linear model where junior staff enable transactional processes including data collection. Mid-level teams analyze details to help identify trends and extract actionable insights and top management leverage these insights to formulate strategy. While that is an ideal scenario, top management often face an overwhelming volume of data with technology and human-related challenges often limiting their ability to interpret and monetize the insights. This gap presents a significant opportunity for innovation. Gaurav Tewari, founder and Managing Partner of Omega Venture Partners. The future of artificial intelligence and work is often discussed in the context of automation versus augmentation.

"Automation" signifies replacing human labor with technology, while "augmentation" enhances human skills with AI. Automation displaces tasks, but augmentation boosts human expertise and offers a sustainable approach to societal welfare and economic growth. However, automation of specific tasks—like interpreting medical images, for example—could help promote equality, drive economic growth and augment work for millions. As managing director of a venture capital firm focused on investing in AI and AI-enabled businesses, I've been able to develop a unique vantage point to inform my perspectives. And from my perspective, automation as a form of augmentation can not only supercharge business workflows but also empower the average worker by helping democratize opportunity. What might be automation for one person could serve as augmentation for another, depending on their unique abilities.

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