Speaking in Davos during the 2025 World Economic Forum, Chris Hyams explained why AI-driven productivity and human adaptability are critical for future success.

Key Takeaways 

  • Businesses must embrace AI now to boost productivity and stay competitive in the face of a shrinking labor force.
  • Adaptability is the most critical skill for the future workforce, as rapid technological advancements will reshape job roles faster than ever before.
  • Responsible AI implementation is crucial, with Hyams emphasising the need for intentional design to prevent bias and ensure fair hiring outcomes.

Companies that succeed in the future of work will do more with less — workers, that is. 

“We are at the start of a race between a shrinking labour force and potential productivity gains from AI — it is actually going to be really essential to take advantage of this,” said Indeed CEO Chris Hyams on a panel at the Bloomberg House in Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting 2025.

Hyams shared insights on the monumental changes these factors are already having on the hiring landscape — and what he sees as the biggest challenges and opportunities they present for talent leaders. Here’s what you need to know to stay ahead.

AI Is Critical to Counterbalance a Shrinking Global Workforce

“From a global macroeconomic perspective, one of the biggest challenges is we have declining birth rates and an ageing workforce,” Hyams said. “Productivity is a huge opportunity, but it is also a necessity.”

Indeed has a unique, real-time view of the evolving labour market through unmatched hiring data from over 58 crore Jobseeker Profiles across 60 countries. With labour force participation plateauing and a growing worker shortage on the horizon, there may soon be more jobs than workers to fill them. 

In a Wall Street Journal Q&A published before the WEF annual meeting, Hyams acknowledges the promise of AI to boost productivity. And in the face of a shrinking labor force, he encourages employers to find ways to broaden their talent pools, for instance, by hiring based on skills rather than formal degrees or experience. 

“Increasingly, AI can help companies prioritise skills-first hiring,” he said in the WSJ. “Historically, recruiters manually sourced and sifted through resumes — a time-consuming and often biased process. Now, AI-powered tools — such as our Smart Sourcing tool — can identify relevant skills for a job posting and quickly surface qualified candidates who might have been overlooked in a manual search.”

But It’s About Augmenting, not Replacing, Human Skills

AI enhances decision-making but achieves the best results when paired with human expertise. “We see the biggest potential impact as AI and human judgment together being able to do something that neither can do alone,” Hyams said.

“We are not trying to create robots to replace humans,” he said in The Wall Street Journal. “We want to use AI to help humans to be more effective and more fair in their decisions. … Indeed’s AI-powered candidate recommendations are twice as likely to lead to a hire when a human reviews them first.”

Looking ahead, Hyams emphasised another critical skill: adaptability. “The most necessary skill for someone to be employable in the decades to come more than anything else is adaptability,” he said. “It is going to become less and less important what knowledge you have because knowledge is now at your fingertips.”

Change Is Coming Faster Than You Think

Though AI will not replace workers anytime soon, it is already reshaping skill expectations and transforming the job market.

Comparing AI to the way the rise of the internet in the 1990s fundamentally transformed jobs across industries, from journalism to transportation and software development, Hyams stated: “In the future, there will be 10 times as many people who are coders than there are today. But what they are doing will look nothing like what a software developer does today — it will be completely unrecognisable.”

In fact, he said, the technological transformation that unfolded over the past three decades will accelerate dramatically.

“I think that it is entirely likely that those 30 years of change in the workforce are going to get crammed into the next three or four years,” Hyams said, signalling a future where businesses and workers must adapt faster than ever before.

For Best Results, Balance Urgency With Responsibility

Though time is of the essence to get started with AI, Hyams cautioned that no tool is ever “only good.” Because AI technology is built on data from existing systems, it inherently has the potential to reinforce or magnify bias. That is why companies must take a proactive approach to ethical AI implementation.

“My belief is that, where we are today, responsible AI is the civil rights and human rights issue of my lifetime, full stop,” Hyams said. “If you look at employment, housing, education, healthcare, the criminal justice system — there are massive inequities in those systems.” Because AI tools identify and reinforce patterns, they can amplify existing biases that may be present in a system. Without intentional efforts from the start to design AI that mitigates bias and promotes fairness, the problem will worsen significantly. 

Recognising the need to address this challenge early, Indeed formed a Responsible AI team with experts from diverse fields — including computer science, sociology and astrophysics — to evaluate systems and build technology based on Responsible AI principles.

“We view ‘Responsible AI’ the term as a socio-technical problem,” Hyams said. “We do not believe it is a technical problem with purely technical solutions. You have to actually understand the social constructs around which these systems are built.” The goal, he added, is to create a system that produces as fair an output as possible.
“And if we can do that, then we can actually create a future that is better for everyone. But that has to be done with intention.”