To Understand How AI Will Transform Work, Start With These Four Questions

If you told somebody living through the Industrial Revolution about desk jobs, they might not even recognise them as work. “You guys have made it,” futurist Sinead Bovell told the crowd at Indeed FutureWorks 2025 in New Orleans. “Nobody is actually working!” Electricity, computers, the internet — each breakthrough reshaped our workplaces and our world. “We invent technology and then technology reinvents how we live,” Bovell said. 

Now with AI, she said, “We are at the beginning of another one of those transformations.” Bovell, founder of tech education company WAYE, urged the audience to imagine this technology’s uncharted future by asking the big “what ifs.”

What if … AI topples the traditional career path in favour of a more flexible workforce?

If AI gains entirely new capabilities every 18 months, would an organisation want to hire for a role that might soon be outdated? Bovell suggested that independent and flexible workers will be more deeply integrated into the workforce, and that the familiar climb up an organisational chart might be replaced with a more fluid, horizontal movement of skills across companies and assignments.

Traditional job functions may no longer be as relevant, Bovell said. A marketer with strong judgment but no financial background, for instance, could — with the analytical support of AI — be better equipped than a finance professional to make investment decisions. “So the idea of jobs and job titles starts to move away,” Bovell said. “And we instead prioritise skills.”

What if … HR builds new jobs in real time?

Not only will AI impact the types of people and systems that HR manages, but, because of AI, HR will play a pivotal role in shaping future jobs. “You will be architecting an entirely different type of organisation, an entirely different type of workflow,” she said. HR will create bespoke roles in real time for the needs of an evolving workplace. ‘You will be just as much HR as a creator, strategist, inventor – thinking like a startup and literally inventing workflows in combination with AI systems’.

What if … AI becomes an essential part of the team?

The modern workplace toolkit includes smartphones, laptops, email addresses and now AI. But, unlike more static forms of technology, AI will soon be akin to team members, Bovell said. That means leaders can expect to manage teams of both people and AIs. “All of these new ways of thinking, of working and organizing ourselves are going to seem radical in the moment,” Bovell said. “But going forward it will become the norm.”

What if … we focus on the potential instead of focusing on today’s limitations? 

People are often confounded by emerging technology; our thinking is too grounded in its current failures, and we fail to take the long view of progress. Consider electricity. “Every single school, hospital, home and manufacturing plant is now powered by what was once seen as one of the most radical technologies,” Bovell said. “It was highly doubted. It went through a lot of hype cycles, a lot of bubbles burst.” 

Today, electricity has been so absorbed into our everyday lives that we take it for granted. “General purpose technologies become infrastructure,” she said. “We rebuild our societies on top of them, and then they move into the background and become the expectation.” That, Bovell said, will be the path for AI. 

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