The Future Normal of Work: "Less, But Better."
The Future Normal of Work: "Less, But Better."
5 optimistic visions of how AI and robots could radically improve the world of work.
This week, I want to bring you a somewhat counter-intuitive theory of the future normal of work and jobs:
“Less, but better.”
You’ll have read a lot about “less”. But “better"? Really?
This is hardly part of the current narrative around the future of work. Even in some of my most tech-loving entrepreneur group chats, people are starting to feel slightly apprehensive.
On some level, it’s not hard to see why. Humanoid robots. Industrial robots. Autonomous agents. Chatbots being deployed at scale. All advancing at astonishing rates.
This month alone:
Figure 1 released a demo of its humanoid robot that can do physical tasks, while also explaining why it took the actions it did.
Cognition released Devin, an autonomous coding bot that can handle end-to-end development projects and has even completed some real-world jobs on Upwork;
Klarna announced that its customer service bot is doing the job of 700 human operators;
Arini launched its automated telephone receptionist for dental practices, able to negotiate and book appointments for patients;
Kernel opened the first of its robot-augmented restaurants, which require just three (yes, 3!) employees per outlet.
Each one of these is an incredible technological leap forward. Yet many of you will read these stories nervously, drawing a line from these demo videos to a dystopian world where millions of humans are replaced and redundant.
However, you can also look forward from these stories and glimpse a more optimistic vision of the future normal of work and jobs that is “Less, But Better”:
Remember: this a provocation, rather than a prediction. I’m not completely naive. It’s easy to imagine a far more dystopian vision. Where for billions, less isn’t better:
Less regulation, more exploitation.
Less money, more precariousness.
Less skill, more struggle.
Less work, greater despair.
It's exactly for this reason that it’s never been more urgent for us – you! – to imagine a better future normal for work. As myself and my coauthor Rohit say in our presentations – “the only future we can make is the one we are able to imagine”.
The best part? After reading these week’s stories, you won’t even have to stretch your imagination.
Let’s see what “less, but better” looks like.
1. Less BS tasks, more human connection.
Less: Last year, Gallup proudly announced that employee engagement reached a record high…
…of 23%.
It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. We live in a world where the vast majority of employees are disengaged.
So, let’s not get too sentimental that Klarna’s customer service bot is ‘replacing’ 700 employees. I suspect most people don’t dream of spending their days responding to 100s of mundane questions about when someone’s fast fashion parcel will arrive, or what a retailer’s return policy is.
The tasks (note the emphasis) that are most ripe for automation are the tasks that few of us want to do.
Better: Abridge uses AI to transcribe and summarise doctor-patient conversations. By freeing doctors from taking notes it allows for more empathetic, patient-focused interactions. Its other killer feature? For patients, it ‘translates’ complex medical details into non-technical, jargon-free notes that they actually prefer to those written by human doctors.
For clinicians, the impact is profound: “I get love letters from clinicians telling me that Abridge has saved their practice, their marriage, [and] their mental health”.
Similarly, doomsayers will look at Arini’s automated dental receptionist and worry that it will replace human receptionists. Low-cost providers might try to take that route, but most practices won’t.
If all we cared about was speed and price, there wouldn't be any coffee shops; we’d all buy our coffee from vending machines.
Rory Sutherland talks of the ‘doorman fallacy’.
If you view a doorman as just opening your doors, then automation will be very attractive. Yet doormen do much more than this – they greet guests, carry bags, give tips and local insights, and more. They elevate the experience and make people feel secure. In the same vein, receptionists do much more than just book appointments. They can sooth patients' nerves and offer comfort. They can explain to patients what to expect. Freed from handling logistics, they can focus on improving the experience for patients (and therefore also for the dentists they’re about to see).
💡 How will you automate functional tasks, in order to humanise emotional moments?
2. Less skill-constrained, more imagination-constrained.
Less: Scott Belsky, Chief Product Officer of Adobe, has a brilliant perspective on how AI removes barriers to doing better work.
He’s talking about creative work here, but the sentiment can easily be expanded:
We’ve shifted from a world where we had to find someone with skills to tell our story to one where we can tell our own story. We’ve shifted from being skills-constrained to being imagination-constrained.
As for professionals … AI unlocks exponentially more cycles of discovery. Exploring the full surface area of possibility for the very best solution to a problem has always been a function of time, and AI changes the game. As a result, professionals are capable of covering more terrain and finding better solutions…thus “raising the ceiling” of what is possible.
Better: With its AI-powered bot handling half of its enquiries, IKEA retrained 8,500 customer service operators to offer disruptively affordable remote interior design consultations. Customers get two calls, personalised moodboards and 3D renders for approximately €100. The retailer generated €1.3 billion of sales through this channel in 2022, while giving these employees more creative and interesting roles.
We’ve seen this before. The number of bookkeepers were decimated by spreadsheets. Yet spreadsheets didn’t destroy jobs – they massively expanded the finance function and created new, higher-skilled and more collaborative jobs (like the much-loved management analyst!).
💡 What new imagination-based services or business models could you offer, if technical skills became abundant?
3. Fewer employees, higher wages.
Less: There are already millions of jobs unfilled, and the situation is set to get worse. The obvious answer is to radically reduce the number of workers required. That’s what Steve Ells, the founder of Chipotle, is doing at Kernel, his new robot-powered, partially-automated restaurant concept where each outlet requires just 3 members of staff.
Better? Yet Ells’ vision isn’t of a completely automated, human-free experience. Indeed, he says, “we’ve taken a lot of human interaction out of the process and left just enough” and “it's really reinventing this 'McJob' that excites me so much … [with only three workers] you can afford to pay $27 an hour and a paid vacation.”
Paying higher salaries to fewer staff can be better for the business too:
More loyalty. Less turnover.
More experience. Better service.
Less burnout. More connection.
Smaller outlets. More local.
In other words they allow organisations to deliver a better customer experience for the same money.
Imagine how less staff (and more robots) could unlock a greater variety of potential business models:
At one extreme, could we see a front of house host or waiter making $200k? Imagine there are no chefs, no dishwashers, and no supervisors. Just a team of two or three magnetic front of house staff who give you the a uniquely fun, life-affirming, and human dining experience?
Equally, you can also imagine a uniquely brilliant chef being able to focus completely on their craft, thanks to a turnkey restaurant operation where everything else – from the ordering of the ingredients to basic prep to delivery, service and cleaning – is completely automated and hassle-free.
💡 What if you could give 80% of the wages you pay today to just 20% of your staff. How could this change how you operate?
4. Lower prices, bigger markets.
Less: It’s easy to look at the world of work with a scarcity mindset. If the cost of something falls, then it must mean less money for those who produce it. In this world, the release of an autonomous programming bot like Cognition’s Devin means ‘it’s so over’ for developers (and industry after industry will experience their own Devin-type disruption).
Better: But there’s another side to this story. Making things radically cheaper and more convenient expands the market. We’ve seen this again and again. The introduction of ATMs made it more affordable to open bank branches – and for decades the industry expansion meant the number of bank tellers kept rising. Similarly, Uber didn’t just cause people to switch from taxis, it expanded the market for rides.
If coding becomes easier then many, many more people will create sites and apps. And until autonomous AI agents are able to consistently and completely (a very, very high bar) automate every task, this expansion will end up massively increasing demand for coders’ skills.
There are two ways this could happen. First, experienced coders will be able to use these tools far better and faster than non-experts. So even if each job is lower paid, professionals could be exponentially more efficient and complete many more tasks working with AI1.
Second, even if most amateurs never take their projects beyond the level of AI’s capability, some will. Imagine a world where 95% of the code in the world is written by AI. If this results a 1,000x expansion in the number of apps and websites, then the 5% share ‘left’ to human coders is a market 50 times bigger than today. And given how few people can code today (and the high cost of working with them), it’s not unreasonable to imagine that with no barriers to entry we could see a 1,000,000-fold expansion in the volume of software projects. Just look at social media. Nearly 4 million videos are uploaded to YouTube each day. Yes, most are terrible and will never be watched. But a tiny minority are excellent, produced by the millions of people who now make their living as professional creators.
💡 Imagine your market got 1,000 times bigger, but AI did 95% of the tasks your people do today? Which tasks will be left for humans to do?
5. Less risk, better welfare.
Less: While the world of work has undoubtedly got safer over time, the WHO estimates that globally, nearly 2 million people die from workplace-related injuries and diseases each year, spanning everything from accidents to long-term exposure to pollutants.
Better: Clearly we’re a long way from eliminating dangerous jobs, but it’s not hard to imagine a future where it’s wholly abnormal to use a human for a dangerous task when humanoid robots like Figure 01 are available.
And even if it takes a while for robots to become ubiquitous, you could easily imagine companies using robots to test new tasks, in order to design processes that humans can then operate safely.
Or what about hybrid human-robot roles? In The Future Normal, we profiled Tiffany Heathcott, a Texan truck driver who now works remotely overseeing and controlling multiple autonomous electric trucks via Einride’s Remote Interface. As she says, rather than spending the majority of the week on the road, remote operation turns trucking from being a psychologically challenging and exclusionary job into one that’s similar to any other office job.
Note: Figure has taken a leaf out of Tesla’s book and published its masterplan, where it outlines a range of possible use cases for humanoid robots – from supporting the elderly to building new worlds in space (!). If you’ve made it this far, then it’s well worth 5 more minutes of your time.
💡 Where are the dirty, dull and dangerous jobs in your organisation? What new opportunities would emerge if these could be done by humanoid robots?
Now, over to you…
As I said in the introduction, the future normal of work and jobs is far from pre-determined.
It’s natural to focus on what we could lose. Humans have a long track record of skepticism and and resistance towards new technologies.2 Yet for every dystopian future, there are optimistic scenarios where AI makes work better for people.
Technology will only be part of the equation. Cars, trucks and planes revolutionised mobility. Left unchecked, they are dangerous machines. That’s why we place huge limits and regulations on them – from their specifications, to controlling who can use them, how they are used, and penalising those who don’t follow the rules. We will surely do the same with AI and robots.
But even before we get to that point, forward-thinking leaders will lean into proactively creating the future of work. By working with AI to unlock “less, but better“ they’ll become magnets for the best human talent.
I hope this piece has inspired you to become one of them.
What’s Your Future Normal?
I have delivered 150+ actionable keynotes and workshops for clients in 30+ countries, with consistently exceptional feedback and repeat bookings.
As well as public conferences, I bring fresh and relevant perspectives on what’s next to leadership teams at the world’s biggest companies – such as J&J, Calvin Klein, HP, Mastercard, the Tata Group, and many more.
Here’s what clients say:
“My go-to speaker for future-gazing grounded in reality is always Henry … free from the BS and hype that's often prevalent in this space!” Founder, MAD/Fest
“Thank you for bringing out-of-the-ordinary ideas to this team of smart, motivated people.” VP, Executive Leadership Development, HP
”Constantly provoking, Henry helps us push the boundaries of our innovation thinking” SVP Digital Services, Mastercard
To discuss your next meeting or event then please reach out directly to Renee Strom or check out my speaking site.
Thanks for reading,
Henry
I recently experienced this myself, when I wanted to create some short clips from a one hour keynote. In theory, there are plenty of online tools that will automate this process. But the reality is that they weren’t quite good enough. But instead, I found someone on Fiverr who created 7 minute-long clips for less than $40!
One of my favourite sites is the Pessimists’ Archive, filled with newspaper clippings of moral panics against books, bicycles, radio, television, and more.