AI’s huge impact on the workplace, and how corporates can manage this change — interview with Future of Work expert Professor Bob Aubrey
This is an interview from the SmartUp.io Leaders Series, where I had the pleasure of talking to Professor Bob Aubrey, who is a leader in the hugely exciting new field studying and predicting the impact of Artificial Intelligence on future learning, future development, and impact on the workplace.
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In this wide ranging, in depth interview Bob talks about:
- How you need to be an “entrepreneur of your own learning” to survive and thrive in world of AI
- That HR will be the center of this fundamental change in the workplace, and how HR professionals can prepare to handle the implementation of AI together with workforce retraining in AI.
- How can we get the synergies of humans working with machines to make a major leap forward in how we work
- Why Asia will be at the forefront of this radical change in the way we work
Bob is also the author of nine thought provoking books, the latest of which is Measure of Man, and has lived and worked in Asia, Europe, and the United States.
Me: It’s a time of tremendous change in the workplace, particularly with the rise of AI. Companies and governments are looking to implement AI in many different ways, which will bring a lot of benefits, but also will inevitably displace and fundamentally change the nature of their workforce. As a CEO, you’ve got to balance implementing AI, re-skilling your current workforce and figure out how to attract the right skills for the future. Its a really delicate path to tread. How do you even start? And what do you as an individual need to learn in order to survive and thrive in a world of AI…
Bob: Yes, it is. I believe we’re in a period of fundamental change. It’s not the first time we’ve been in a such a period, but this one is different because we’re confronted for the first time with the idea that human learning can be surpassed by machine learning.
If I’m an employee and I’m thinking “What do I need to learn to be able to have a place in the workforce of tomorrow?”, the problem is that I don’t really know the answer because it’s changing all the time. For example, I might say I have to be digitally savvy, but do I really? It’s possible that machines will make most digital work so easy that I would have more value working on other types of skills?
There’s an interesting book by Geoff Colvin called “Humans are underrated” which is about jobs that primarily involve more human skills — empathy, ability to communicate —potentially being the ones that machines will not be able to replicate, whereas the higher level skills that we have in the workforce, such as mathematics and engineering, will primarily be dominated by AI.
So it’s really very difficult for us to say at the moment what people need to learn. We also know that for the first time, the speed of learning and the speed of change is something that we’re not in control of, because machines can learn faster, and so we don’t know exactly where the impact is going to happen in the workforce when it comes down to details.
It’s a particularly difficult climate for leaders. I think the question is, what should a leader be saying to their workforce, given that they cannot promise you’ll have a job. I think the key comes back to the idea of personal development, of the individual managing and driving development, as we’re starting to see in the gig economy where people become independent workers.
So, the message from a leader to their employees is: you have to learn but we cannot tell you today exactly what you need to learn. Our moral contract is going to be that we will continue to communicate with you about the changes that our industry and business are going through. We will be transparent, and we will help you as much as we can to be able to get through to the next stage. But ultimately, you have your part to do as well.
You have to be entrepreneurs for your own learning and for your own careers in the future because nobody could say for sure what’s going to happen.
Me: That’s a brilliant way of looking at this change. Corporates are really struggling with this, and that’s why having experts like you coming in and helping them through process is so crucial. The HR teams have to deal with some major concerns from employees like “Does this mean I’m going to lose my job?”, “ What exactly is going to happen?”. But it’s also like when computers were first implemented in the workplace. Those who learned how to use them thrived.
Bob: This is an area where HR professionals will have a key role. But most of them have never dealt with such large scale change before. If you are a HR professional in a fairly large company being heavily impacted by AI technologies, you’re going to need help from your external providers. For example, companies like IBM that are investing very heavily in AI can tell you what’s happening in other companies and what you can expect. You also need consultants and you need to work with your internal people. And in many cases, you’re going to need to work with your own government. And that changes from one country to the next.
I’m living now in Singapore, and the Singapore government has this future workforce plan in which they are really trying to transition their current workforce, which is based a lot on clerical work in banking or accounting, because suddenly these jobs could disappear as they are taken over by software and by algorithms. So what do you do next? Suddenly you need a creative workforce, you need a tech-savvy workforce, an entrepreneurial workforce. And we’re talking about the same people who are working in clerical work who will have to be working in very different ways.
This change is at such a scale that governments will have to get involved.
Me: How much do HR leaders and people really need to understand these disruptors to their business? Do they need to understand what is AI and what is the impact of AI in their business? How to handle it? They‘re certainly going to need to have quite a deep understanding of something challenging facing their business, right?
Bob: You really have to understand enough of it to be able to say, “Oh, this is going to have an impact on my company. Who do I need to talk to? How do I get help?” And me, as an individual, if I’m at a leadership position, how am I going to lead this transition of human development?
While I think it’s actually one of the best times to be in the HR business, if you’re not working at a strategic level, your future is very much in doubt.
We also have to start identifying what are the strengths of humans in the workforce, how can we get the synergies of humans working with machines to make something even better because that’s what’s coming.
As a HR expert, the concept of “The future of work is human” is about helping me focus on why I joined the profession, because I can see the potential of human development.
Here’s a time in history that is unprecedented and in which HR professionals have a very important role to play. People are going to be looking to them for strategic thinking and leadership — where 10 or 20 years ago, management would say to HR people things like: “Oh, just look at the performance metrics and carry that out or roll out that out. We don’t really care what you think. Oh, and by the way, you’re not really expected to be a strategic thinker.”
It’s now completely different. Now people in the HR business have got to be strategic thinkers. They are going to be at the forefront of the biggest disruption to humanity.
Me: There are some great HR people — particularly in Asia I find, from smart companies like Maxis and Aviva, etc. —that are actually ahead of their counterparts in Europe and the US in some ways, in terms of their thinking. In Singapore in particular. So Singapore is at the forefront of change — you’re absolutely right — they realised that most clerical and administration jobs are going to be rapidly replaced by AI. They’ve funded a 2.4 billion dollar go digital program for businesses in Singapore.
It’s really interesting; they’ve got an issue, which is, they’re encouraging SMEs to go digital, to go AI, to go faster, but that’s also going to displace people faster than they can retrain them. So how do you even go about that balance on the government level? Also there are people here who do feel like they’re in a job for life: “I’m protected, Singapore will always look after me”. But that’s probably not going to be case in the future. It’s a really interesting time.
Bob: It is, because if there’s any government that’s leading technological change and really setting the pace for what companies are going to do about it, you’ll find that it’s Singapore to a large extent. In the past, Singapore would define the industrial policy, and decide where they’re going. But this time it’s different.
For example, Singapore has a very high employment rate. Unemployment is currently at 2% — and when it goes above 2%, it becomes a real political problem in Singapore. It’s a problem that most politicians around the world would like to have. Singapore wants to have a fully employed population.
But while Singapore has an educated and skilled population, it’s not educated and skilled for the future needs.
They have an large older generation who do not have an university education. Many of these people, they are being transitioned out of their current jobs. However, it’s not that they retire early; Singaporeans always work, so many of them become taxi drivers. But Singapore is pioneering self-driving taxis, so these taxi drivers are soon going to be out of a job, and then what else can they do?
The Singapore government’s mantra is that we must move forward, we must embrace change, and we must be very focused on what’s going on around the world and try to bring some of the most important technologies to Singapore that we think we can capitalise on. Let’s attract industries to come in, let’s also attract startups, and try to encourage our people, but also other entrepreneurs to come to Singapore and set up their companies.
Singapore is moving ahead. They’re not just saying, “Oh, we’ll let the market decide.” They really do want to support their population. There’s a culture in Singapore of learning and adaptations. People are open to change and they know they have to learn new things, and they are quite keen to go on training courses, etc. to help them for their future.
At the same time it’s unpredictable where they are going. There’s a certain amount of anxiety. I remember the day that the market crashed in 2008, there was a university professor saying, “I’ve been around for a long time” — this guy was in his 70's — “I’ve never seen anything like this. I’m not old enough for the great depression, but we’re in something like that.” At the same time a young Singaporean I was talking with in 2008 was like, “I don’t have to worry about it, the Singapore government will take care of it.”
But those days are over for Singapore. They’re over for everybody else as well.
Me: As a HR leader who has to be very strategic going forward, what’s the 4–5 step process to learn how to manage the disruption of AI in the workplace? For example: I’m a HR leader, I’m in a big corporate, and I’m suddenly realising I’m going to manage a massive strategic change here. Where do I start?
Bob: Firstly you have to look at what other HR leaders are doing. You can read articles and books, but until you talk to somebody doing the kind of job you’re doing and faced with similar things then you really can’t get started.
The second thing, however, as I mentioned before, is that leaders today need help from the outside. HR leaders have to step up to a strategic role which requires a lot of learning and a certain amount of courage.
In Asia we’re leading the world in terms of economic and population growth. Take a look at the map below, inside that circle which includes China, India and Southeast Asia there are more people than there are outside the circle in the rest of the world.
But also, there are more university graduates inside that circle than there are outside the circle!
In Asia, this technological change is going to happen faster than anywhere else, because there is more human potential here than anywhere else in the world, and Asia’s leaders really are thinking strategically, figuring out how they can play a key part in this transition.
The third thing is communication. HR leaders need to contribute to their executive team by helping them to have a human development strategy, because many top executives have never been trained in such a skill. Most come from a finance or engineering background, so they’re very comfortable with numbers and the clarity that you get with numbers, but understanding human development is a soft skill,
But how do I actually measure a strategy going beyond corporate values or going beyond the employee value proposition in saying, “We’ll take care of you, we’ll give you more opportunities”? Now I have to break this down into a strategy that says, there are deliverables that are not necessarily measured in numbers; they are measured in terms of a mindset, they are measured in terms of motivation to learn and to change, and I have to be able to cascade this down to the managers in my organisation and eventually to every individual employee in my organisation and even outside my organisation — my eco-system of partners and suppliers.
Me: And internally within the organisation — people who usually dealt with HR as HR — as you say, like performance metrics, mandatory training, something like that — and suddenly everybody else in the organisation — the sales guys, the marketing guys, etc — have to look to HR to help them from a strategic element, so it’s a shift in thinking what everybody else is thinking. It’s a really big shift.
Bob: Companies need to take advantage of the experience that leaders in Asia have. For instance a US company may have a very talented Chinese HR leader who understands better than anyone in the company what is going to happen, but he’s Chinese so therefore he will never be able to work to get the top job at headquarters. Very, very few US companies have brought the local leaders in Asia up to the very top level.
People sitting in Asia are confronted with a very fast-moving young population, for which they need to make faster decisions and implement newer tools, but they are not able to implement them because they have to follow the policies that have been decided by the head office in the US or elsewhere.
I’d just like to talk about one more step, and that is the communication and learning function. So once you’ve got the strategy, then as a manager, you’ve got to set up learning systems and communication systems that are quite different from what traditionally has been sort of top-down and programmed situations.
Let’s take learning; I deal with a lot with corporate universities through the EFMD. We credit corporate universities to see if they are good or not. But the traditional corporate university is one in which you have a nice building, the CEO would say, “We’ve got to have this because I want to bring my leaders so we can do our strategy together. I also want our company’s technology people, marketing people, depending on the business, to be able to come together and to bring things together.” So everything was sort of assumed to require classroom-type learning, and assumed to have a sort of top-down type of communication, but this is too slow now, and doesn’t scale fast enough.
Me: Yes, these days by the time you’ve propagated a new strategy and learning throughout a large organisation via face to face training, it’s probably out of date. You need peer to peer digital platforms that can encourage and share knowledge fast — especially on mobile.
Yes, it has to be speeded up because machines are still going to learn faster than us in the things that they can learn so we have to go really fast.
Everybody has to be learning constantly, and there’s no way we can bring just everybody to a sort of central campus anymore. There has to be more.
We have to do it through distributive learning, and it’s very difficult for us to start to thinking about learning in terms of number of training days, which is what we still measure, or training budgets.
It’s not all about training, it’s about self-learning and learning all the time on the job.
So professionals have to really, fundamentally change the understanding of what learning is, and the most important foundation for fast learning is the individual motivation of people to learn on their own, to take their own initiative to learn, and to see the relationship of what they are learning to their own improvement — both as a contributor for their company, but also as a contributor to their own futures.
To get this sort of balance of learning that’s on one side personal development — which is, I’m building my career, I’m going to be working for a lot longer than I thought I was going to be working when I was young, and we’re talking now up until about age 80.
Wow, if I’m going to be working for that long, I don’t want to be working in a job I don’t like, so I’d better be learning how to do the kind of job I want to do. On the other hand, I have to learn how to contribute to a company that’s changing very quickly.
It’s fine to have a corporate university campus but that’s not where the quantity of learning is, and it’s not even where the innovative learning takes place in many cases; much of it takes place at the margins where you’re trying something new in a new business or going into a new market and the people who are doing that have to tell us what’s working what’s not working. So if you’re in a position of trying to change this whole system and paradigm, it’s extremely challenging.
Again, we see there are people who are doing it, there are big companies that are more agile than others — GE is still an example of a company that can make big, big changes quite quickly — and we need to start learning how to do that. The days in which we can sort of sit back and say “I’m getting close to retirement, I’ll just keep my job and keep going with what i know,” those days are gone. I think HR leaders will be on the hot seat and their jobs can be replaced by people quite quickly. So it’s a very challenging time for those people who are actually trying to implement this inside their company.
Me: It is a very, very challenging time. That’s fantastic advice. Lets finish off by talking about your latest book, Measure of Man.
Just explain what the book is about, and the theories that are in the book, and the advice.
Bob: I’ll be happy to do that. The title Measure of Man sums up all my years of thinking through learning and people development. The book starts out with the idea that what we measure in today’s companies is only part of reality.
Most companies metrics are performance-based. If you look at the publication of management articles and management books, the great majority today — more than any other subject — is about performance. Since the 1990s, particularly in the US, people have developed a whole series of tools and measurements that go from the top to bottom. If your company is on the stock market then you have to report performance indicators every quarter from every aspect of your business and a financial analyst then says whether your stock value is going up or going down. If it goes down a couple of quarters in a row, as a CEO you’re in trouble, which is very short-term thinking.
It’s very analytical and numbers-based, but we know that not everything can be measured in that kind of time frame in that kind of way.
With Measure of Man, I was looking for was how can we do this differently. Many companies today are managed using KPI’s — key performance indicators — so what I offered in in the book was a new concept called KDI — Key Development Indicators. The idea is not to get rid of performance, but it’s to say performance is not the whole story.
As an example, we talk about skilled workforce or competent workforces. Competency as a definition for work has been around since the 1970s. It came because people found that there’s no correlation between intelligence and job or career success, so the concept of competency became important. If you try to create a description of the competency for doing a particular job, what do you do? You have to look at what the job of that person is doing and you have to ask them how they are doing the job and what is takes to do that job.
The indicators are words and somehow you’ve got to put those words into a framework — which we call a competency grid — and it doesn’t get to numbers until the point at which you’re starting to say, okay at this level you’re incompetent; at this level you’re learning to become competent; at this level you are competent (which gives me my competency description); and at this level you’re super competent or excellent, and maybe you can move on to the next job which require higher levels of competency.
But it’s based on words; the quality of the competency grid is the quality of the description you have, and that description is changing quite quickly. Companies don’t go through creating competency grids every six months according to how jobs do, so how do we actually start to use the descriptions and the words and the behaviour observation that we need to have in key development indicator?
When I started writing the book, I was using things that I knew worked in the social sciences, psychology, even philosophy — I’ll come back to that in a minute — the good news is now, we have artificial intelligence, we’ve got companies like IBM that are saying, if I take any text — the Watson thing — you give me some text, you send it to me and I will analyse and I’ll tell you what your personality is. I did this, and it didn’t actually describe my personality very well. But it can only get better as AI starts to develop the expertise and the ability that we have to observe people.
Imagine a performance review of the future. An employee and a manager are in a room together, with cameras, skin sensors and maybe brain sensors. The manager says, “Do you like your job? Do you feel you’re doing a good job? What do you think you need to do to do a better job?” We can capture the information from the emotions, we can capture the information from reading how the person is responding to the facial muscles, we know what the person is feeling.
It’s so invasive that the job of human HR professionals will be to say, “Where do we draw the line to what you cannot record?” We know where you are, we know what you’re thinking, we know the state of your health, we know whether you’re happy in the company, and we have the predictability to know whether you’ll be successful in the company. We can do that all today just by using the metrics that we can take off social media as well as the recordings that we can make.
So we actually do need to do KDIs and we need to have this sort of dual language — a language of behaviour as well as a language of performance — and so that’s the reason I wrote the book.
Human development economists, some of which have won Nobel prizes, started working with the UN to say, how can we measure human development? The UN has a human development index, which is the measure of some of the metrics like education, health, etc. which is all numbers-based but it’s very primitive.
If you take the other thing that the UN has been doing through the work of Nobel prize winner Amartya Sen — which is that development is freedom. Freedom means, I have some control over the system that is controlling me. In other words, I have a voice in my company — so I’m talking about work — but i also have my work as being linked somehow to my aspirations. It’s not just enough to live on. And so the International Labour Organization has taken that definition and say our goal — the only worldwide organization that we have today, says our goal is to develop decent work — it’s not just having a job; it’s decent work in which people can link their work to aspirations. Yes, they have a voice in their company; yes, they have enough to live on; and yes, they are respected according to the human rights frameworks.
So this is already there, it’s just going to be a question of how we fast we are going to be able to move towards this larger idea of human development as a means to an end to economic performance but also as an end in itself, which is as the CIPD says, the future of work is human, so the human development is a goal in itself in companies. Some companies do that, and some companies don’t.
I think what we’re going to start seeing is, because of the challenges we see with the impact of technology, that this whole question of what does it mean to have people at work, or out of work, really is the key question of our time. Bill Gates saying we should have employee tax for robots, and other people saying we should have guaranteed minimum living standards — these kinds of questions are the beginning of the kind of policies that we are going to see in the future.
