- 18 hours ago
AI is accelerating changes that many labor markets were already struggling to absorb. Across sectors, companies face simultaneous talent shortages, rising pressure on productivity, and growing concerns around youth unemployment and workforce displacement. The result is a widening gap between the jobs economies need filled and the skills many workers actually have. For employers, this is becoming less a question of recruitment than reinvention. How do organizations retrain workers fast enough for roles that are evolving in real time? Which sectors are already feeling the greatest pressure? And as economies compete for growth amid demographic decline and technological disruption, can reskilling move fast enough to prevent parts of the workforce from being left behind?
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00:00Hello everyone I'm Karen Cho from CNBC. Happy anniversary to Viva first up and I must say I've been coming
00:06here for 10 years and it's amazing to see the development. Over those 10 years we've also been talking about
00:11the evolving jobs market. At one point I was saying to Becky I was speaking to her CEO about space
00:18travel and of course this year we've had the SpaceX IPO so this conference has been truly at the forefront
00:25of some of the changes we're seeing in the labour market.
00:28But let me just kick off with an outlook on the labour market and Salia the World Economic Forum has
00:32done so much research on the disruption coming what we're facing today. Economists are saying look there's nothing to see
00:39here. There is not huge disruption yet in the workforce but by numbers last month AI layoffs they were cited
00:46as being down to the technology. 150k of jobs I believe it is in some of the technology companies already.
00:52What are you seeing? How is the jobs market holding up?
00:55Okay so a few points here. I think you're absolutely right that some of the current concerns are not yet
01:04showing up in the data. So we do an outlook for the next five years and what we found is
01:10that there is a net positive expected in terms of job growth versus job decline.
01:16But there isn't much adjacency between the types of jobs that will be declining and the types of jobs that
01:22will be growing. So that brings us to that sort of re-skilling and up-skilling challenge.
01:27The second point I would make is that there's more than artificial intelligence and technological change that's driving this.
01:35There's a green transition while at the same time as a resurgence of focus around older forms of energy. There's
01:44also concerns about an economic uncertainty that have also been very pervasive and have just become sort of worse with
01:53what's been happening in the last few months.
01:55And that of course is changing the geography of jobs as well. So all of those things together I think
02:01are creating this sense of uncertainty.
02:03We did ask and then I'll stop. We did ask a set of chief economists what they thought the impact
02:10of artificial intelligence would be in two years versus in ten years on jobs.
02:14And in the two-year time frame, they're far more downbeats than in the ten-year time frame.
02:20So their sense is we're looking at a disruption which will be, yes, very challenging to manage in the next
02:26couple of years.
02:27But in the longer term, there's a lot of upside.
02:30So a bumpy road to cross before we get to the other side.
02:33Becky, it was your CEO this year that I was talking to on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum.
02:38And he was saying to me, look, the entry-level jobs, if you consider what's happening at the graduate level
02:43from universities versus the school leavers,
02:46it's telling you that there's more of a cyclical problem, not an AI problem.
02:50Are you still seeing that since we had that conversation in January or are things accelerating because of AI?
02:55Yeah, so we actually have a real-time, real-world view.
02:59And so you took the out. I'll take the inside, Sadia.
03:02What we're seeing is we are starting to see some disruption in pockets.
03:06Coders. Many of you have heard about coders. We're actually seeing that in the data.
03:10Call centers. So it's interesting because coders are more around job loss.
03:14Call centers are more around quality gained.
03:17And so versus job loss, they're actually adding capability to humans like us to have a better experience.
03:22And I think the comment on the timing of the disruption.
03:26So we are seeing a shift in the underlying shape of the job market.
03:30It's the timing we have to sync up.
03:32But I will say one thing, Sadia, a forward development engineer, a forward design engineer,
03:37none of us had heard of that six months ago, and now it is all the rage.
03:40And so this idea that it's going to take a long time to see these new jobs, we're seeing them
03:44now.
03:45So in the meantime, are we also hearing the excuse of AI, that that's just being used because CapEx is
03:52high,
03:53there's uncertainty, as we mentioned, around the geopolitics?
03:55Are some companies just saying, oh, we're having mass layoffs because of AI?
04:00Yeah, obviously, I can't see in the mind of the companies.
04:03But I will say, I think there was some overhiring coming out of COVID.
04:06There's some of that that's being worked through now.
04:08And there are companies, and we spend our time with CEOs around the world,
04:12there are companies that are saying, we don't know where to hire, so we're going to wait.
04:17And so we're letting go of some overhiring, and we're waiting to see what's going to happen for the future.
04:22I want to talk about the jobs again in the situation, because that is something that's been cited,
04:28even with the sell-off in the market around the SaaS, the software situation that could be coming.
04:34People were worried that, look, moats that have been around software,
04:36one of the most profitable parts of the tech universe could be shrinking.
04:40Is this just a precursor for what could also happen to the jobs market?
04:43How do you think those fears are out there in the economy, in society?
04:48How are people feeling about job security right now?
04:52Yeah, so I think I really want to second Becky's point there.
04:57I think there is a moment of pause happening across many different industries,
05:02simply because they're waiting out this current moment of uncertainty.
05:07I think some may have a legitimate reason when they're pointing to artificial intelligence,
05:13and in other cases, it really is about the broader economic uncertainty.
05:17But then coming back to your piece around software engineers,
05:21so we asked chief economists in January what they thought would be happening
05:27in terms of productivity gains across multiple industries.
05:29We asked across 20 different industries.
05:32And we asked them again in May, so just this last month,
05:36whether they thought that their expectation of the time to productivity gains had changed.
05:41And back in January, across all industries,
05:45the average expectation of productivity gains was something between one and two years.
05:50Now, just a few months later, the average expectation is something like three to four years.
05:56So their own time frame of when they're expecting to see productivity gains has shifted out quite a lot.
06:02And I think that has some good news built into it.
06:05There's still some uncertainty, because we don't know if they're expecting those productivity gains
06:09because of essentially efficiency gains, and because they're replacing and automating,
06:15or is it because they're expecting much more augmentation?
06:18We don't know that.
06:19But there is something very interesting in the fact that they're now thinking this is further out,
06:24which means there's actually a moment of tackling this issue.
06:27And I think going back to just sort of the beginning of this, the framing of this session,
06:33there have been concerns about skills mismatches for as long as we've been measuring this.
06:39And so now the issue has become more accelerated, more charged, there's more anxiety,
06:44but then this is exactly also the moment to finally tackle that reskilling and upskilling challenge.
06:50I'd love to bring the worker into the room, if I could,
06:52because you asked about how workers are feeling.
06:54We did research for 14,000 workers in seven countries, so broad view.
07:00And we asked them, how are you feeling about the exact question you asked?
07:04And what we found is that workers feel quite confident.
07:07In fact, the number was like 89%.
07:09So almost all workers feel confident in their ability to do their job today.
07:1450% of them are using AI already, maybe not at work, but in personal situations.
07:19And yet worker confidence is declining.
07:21And so you have to ask, why is that happening?
07:24And it's because we as leaders are not taking control of the narrative and saying,
07:28this is what we're working on.
07:30This is how we're going to upskill and reskill you.
07:32And to your point, we know that 70% of companies are spending on AI,
07:37but only 20% of companies are investing in learnability for AI for their own employees.
07:42And that's a leadership gap.
07:44That's not a human gap.
07:45When it comes to the use of AI, you just mentioned a 50% number,
07:49but I've seen other stats that are quite low in the teens, for instance.
07:52And we know in some companies, the AI has been given to the managers only to try and figure out,
07:58to work out how it should be used by workers, how the productivity gain should be felt.
08:02When do we see it at scale where we need the reskilling of employees to use the technology?
08:08Yeah, well, I think we want to be preparing our workforce now.
08:11You know, reskilling, and Sadie and I have not talked about this,
08:14but we both partnered on this, I think, back in 2014 for the World Economic Forum
08:18on this whole reskilling revolution.
08:20We talk about reskilling as this big point in time.
08:23One time we're all going to learn something new.
08:25And the truth is, it's going to be micro-skilling.
08:27We're going to have to start upskilling ourselves constantly
08:30because skills are moving at the pace of technology.
08:33So we have to move at the pace of technology.
08:35And I also think human skills are often referred to as soft skills.
08:40Well, soft skills are now strategic skills.
08:42And so as tech becomes more human, we have to become more technical as humans,
08:47but we also have to become more human.
08:49And that means communication, collaboration, courage, risk-taking,
08:53all the things that tech can't do.
08:54And I would prepare that today.
08:56We don't have to wait for jobs to change.
08:58We can nurture that today.
09:00Yeah, I mean, there is a huge potential upside to these very tools
09:04because they can help personalize education, reskilling, and upskilling.
09:08And that gives, again, an opportunity for this just not just to happen on a constant basis,
09:13but so that we don't try to have sort of cookie-cutter programs
09:16that are suspected to apply to everybody,
09:18but we can actually do a lot more of that personalization and customization
09:21to people's specific skills gaps and their specific skills needs.
09:26So there is a huge possibility here.
09:29At the same time, I don't want to downplay the reskilling and upskilling challenge.
09:33So if the global workforce was 100 people,
09:3711 of those people would not be able to be reskilled and upskilled and redeployed
09:42within either their own company or in their own industry.
09:46And if that is the case, then we're really looking at something that needs to be solved,
09:50not just by companies alone, but by the public sector partnering with the private sector.
09:55And that's where I'd say, you know, OECD budgets,
09:580.11% of that currently goes to reskilling and upskilling for adults.
10:04So in the post-university education space, it sounds like a small number,
10:08but that's a massive, massive number if you look at the absolute, you know, dollars, euros, etc.
10:14that are going into this space across the OECD.
10:16So again, if that funding is used better and is actually supported by a lot of these tools,
10:23so there can be much more customised learning and that's aligned with better job centres,
10:29better support for career guidance, a lot more can be done.
10:32Let me ask the wider question because as we talk about disruption,
10:35it feels like it comes into the conversation more from a developed market perspective.
10:40You work for company X, you know, your skill set is going to have to be this
10:44and this is how it gets fixed, this is the bridge.
10:47But I was talking to the World Bank Group the other week
10:49and they have done some numbers where they see a massive gap in jobs,
10:54the availability of jobs for all the countries that they cover.
10:58That effectively, you've got a population growth that looks like this
11:01and you've got jobs being created at this pace.
11:04But as we change the sort of jobs that are being created
11:07and you're trying to drag developing countries into the mix,
11:11are those jobs going to be in some of these developing countries?
11:14So, I would say actually what we're finding is that the opportunity is even bigger
11:19in most developing markets and in most emerging markets.
11:22So, actually the World Bank has amazing data about how AI can be used
11:27in fairly basic phones to support female farmers with weather patterns.
11:33Now, that's incredibly helpful for somebody who has little access to resources,
11:38but this is a resource that can completely change when they go into planting season,
11:43what type of fertilizer to use, etc., etc.
11:46It can help them a lot.
11:47Another example is, you know, somebody who's a construction manager or a construction worker.
11:52If they can use artificial intelligence for supporting them on safety, for example,
11:59that changes completely, not just the efficiency,
12:01but the outcomes and the safety of that job in many places around the world
12:06where normally there wouldn't be that kind of support and safety.
12:09So, I think, again, the possibilities of how we can imagine using artificial intelligence alongside jobs,
12:16including in very low-skilled contexts, I think there's a huge opportunity there.
12:21When we're seeing this today already, I mean, in sales,
12:24sales is one of the places AI is really taking hold,
12:27helping people know who to call on, what's the conversation to have.
12:31You're with Karen today.
12:32What is Karen interested in?
12:33It's helping and all of that, and that's happening today.
12:36You know, we often say AI is coming to your job, not for your job,
12:40because it is about augmentation, and you used that word.
12:42It's really about augmentation.
12:44I want to talk about how you can have better opportunities
12:48thanks to using AI or having the right credentials,
12:51because I spoke to another recruiter, and they said to me,
12:54there is evidence that if you have AI credentials,
12:58then you are unlocking a faster career path than those who don't.
13:03You're getting higher wages, and you're getting better opportunities.
13:07Are you seeing that as well?
13:09Yeah, so in the U.S. today, about 3% of the jobs require AI skills,
13:14and you might say 3% sounds like a low number.
13:17It's about 180,000 people,
13:19and it's a whole net new area.
13:22And what are AI skills?
13:23AI fluency is understanding prompt engineering.
13:26What does that mean?
13:27Knowing what to type in to ask a question.
13:30And so it does, you know, I heard Satya Nadella speak a few years ago,
13:33and he said,
13:34never has the gap between the expert and the average been more narrow.
13:38Never has the gap between the expert and the average been more narrow,
13:41and that's because AI gives us access to information capabilities we wouldn't otherwise have.
13:47So I do think it's an opportunity for equalization in some areas.
13:50Yeah, you see that as a journalist, actually, where you're a specialist in something,
13:54but everybody else knows a lot about specific areas,
13:57and that's all over social media, for instance, as well.
13:59I mean, we've been looking at, you know, what are the core skills today,
14:04and what are the most desired skills in five years' time.
14:07And yes, absolutely, there's a huge premium on AI literacy plus,
14:12so being able to do a lot more with that technology.
14:15But there's also a huge premium, as you said earlier,
14:18on critical thinking and collaboration and leadership skills and social skills.
14:22And I think those two things together are just going to remain at the top of those rankings,
14:27because we're going to need both.
14:29Yes, we're going to need people that can work with technology,
14:31but we're going to need people that can work with people.
14:34What are the jobs of the future, though?
14:37I spoke to Box the other day, and they were creating a whole heap of new roles.
14:41I think it was about 13 new roles they had come up with.
14:44You know, most of the people we're speaking to, we keep saying,
14:47you know, are you shedding jobs?
14:49What are the jobs of the future?
14:50And a lot of people cannot answer it,
14:51but he came up with very specific jobs.
14:54You know, one of the examples, too, was like,
14:57just because you're vibe coding doesn't mean you don't need engineers anymore.
15:00You need somebody to check the code,
15:02someone to change it down the track and tweak it and make them more personalized.
15:05But what do you think the jobs of the future are?
15:07I'd say vibe coder would be one for a design engineer,
15:11and it depends on how you define the future.
15:13Again, it didn't exist six months ago, and it's here now.
15:16Computer network architects, you know, we're seeing huge growth in that,
15:18and it's this pocket we hadn't.
15:20At the same time, to your earlier point, we're seeing growth in construction managers.
15:24So hard skills and then soft skills.
15:28And so those are some of the jobs we're seeing start to take off right now.
15:32Yeah, I would say that we're starting to see evidence of,
15:36we've certainly seen the evidence of automation in some cases in some companies.
15:40We're starting to see the evidence of augmentation.
15:43I think we can imagine what greater augmentation could look like,
15:47but that's going to take an act of leadership as well across multiple sectors.
15:50But I'm not sure that beyond a few of these examples,
15:54we have a very clear picture of what would be the holy new roles that would emerge.
15:58And that is because most organizations, we survey organizations all the time,
16:02all of the top businesses.
16:04So these are some of the largest organizations in the world.
16:07Most of them say that they're in the first six months of their AI implementation journey.
16:13They just don't yet actually know what it would look like
16:17to then be able to transform enough of their processes
16:21that they can get to those new jobs.
16:23I think we just don't know right now.
16:25Which ties back, Karen, to the question you opened around our workers afraid.
16:29It's because we as leaders can't see the future clearly
16:31and therefore we can't articulate that clearly.
16:33So we say little to nothing.
16:35Which makes sense.
16:36Here were some of the jobs.
16:37AI business automation engineers, AI architects, AI model evaluators.
16:44Those were some of the jobs that they were talking about.
16:47But I want to pick up on the jobs of the future from the space angle
16:51because I was talking to Manpower here at VivaTech several years ago.
16:55It actually might have been about seven years ago
16:57with the flight director of NASA.
16:58And she was pointing out to us that they're not just hiring astronauts.
17:04They're not just hiring people with incredible science degrees.
17:08She was telling us that, look, you need to be able to communicate what you're doing.
17:12The communication skills are enormous.
17:14I thought worth bringing up, given we've just seen the launch of SpaceX,
17:18the IPO this week, given we've had a company now that is challenging
17:22some of the top companies for market value,
17:25what, number four yesterday, in terms of how it was trading on the stock market.
17:29If we are creating bigger and bigger space companies from here,
17:33surely the jobs are going to be attached to space companies.
17:36So how do we think about these future employers?
17:40Yes, I think defense is a large growing area now.
17:44Space is a large growing area now.
17:46So we are seeing these pockets start to emerge.
17:50They are hiring engineers, Karen, but they're hiring, again, construction managers.
17:54So they're hiring on both sides.
17:55And that they're hiring people who can do coding and vibe coding.
17:58And so I love when new industries emerge because they actually hire horizontally versus hiring vertically.
18:04And so we're seeing a lot of pocket in the defense and aerospace.
18:08What's your view, Sadia?
18:10Because obviously space was right on the agenda at the World Economic Forum as we're talking about AI.
18:15I mean, all of those are very exciting spaces.
18:18All of the new frontier technologies, whether that is space or quantum or biotechnology,
18:24there's so much that is happening that's in that frontier technology space.
18:28But I think the really interesting opportunity for artificial intelligence right now
18:34is how it's going to make kind of the old new again.
18:37So, you know, going back to that agriculture example,
18:40the largest employment sector in the world right now is still agriculture.
18:45And I think we tend to think of it as this sort of old industry.
18:48But if in that relatively ancient industry you have all of these new changes and revolutions,
18:55the roles in that industry will look completely different in five to ten years' time.
18:59And I don't think we know that right now.
19:01But again, it could potentially be done.
19:04So that's where I think there's this layer of change across all industries
19:08that will be very exciting to watch.
19:10Something we're seeing at the company level is that companies that have done something for years
19:15made not a ton of money out of it, there's not been a lot of revenue growth,
19:18have suddenly worked out that they have a capability when it comes to AI.
19:23And I'll give you an example.
19:24I mean, Nokia, I've been covering telecoms forever, a very low-growth industry,
19:28and if no one's ordering the telecom equipment, then nobody's really getting paid.
19:33Nokia's been one of the best-performing stocks so far this year.
19:35At any given moment, it's up 180-odd percent year-to-date.
19:38That was because of AI optics.
19:41It has interconnectors in the data center that speak to each other.
19:45So given all the equipment it was making over the years,
19:47it figured out it could make products for the AI universe.
19:52But isn't this the same as what jobs they're going to be able to do in future?
19:56Oh, I've been doing this for years, and suddenly that is a capability we need in AI.
20:01Yeah, so I think now you're getting into skills, because it's really, you think about,
20:05and I think it's your data that would say 40% of jobs or skills will be disrupted by 2030,
20:11but we as humans are whole.
20:13We're not a portion of a job.
20:14And so we have to step back and say,
20:16what are the skills that I can bring to the table as a human,
20:18and how are those going to be in demand?
20:20And so it's just like companies.
20:21You have to look at yourself as your core capability, and you brought up agrarian.
20:26If you go back to the Industrial Revolution, in many ways it made us less human,
20:30because it made us more routine.
20:32And all we're doing now is taking that routine into a different direction
20:35and becoming more human again.
20:36And so I'm actually encouraged.
20:38I just want to spend a moment on risks as well,
20:41because one of the initial conversations we've had for years at WEF
20:45was about the disruption and whether some sort of universal basic wage will be required,
20:50you know, how we manage some of the bumpiness that is coming.
20:53What discussions are you hearing on that front this year,
20:56the sort of fiscal support from governments if we do hit a patch of economic disruption
21:01for employer ease?
21:02Yeah.
21:03I think governments will need to play a huge role in this space.
21:06Again, because of the support that's going to be needed for those workers
21:11that will not find the possibility of being redeployed where they are.
21:15But even more so because governments need to think about the foresight
21:19that is needed to make this work.
21:21So there's, you know, some shining examples of countries like Singapore
21:24that not now but 10 years ago set up things like the Skills Future Singapore program
21:30where not only do they provide much better forecasts than I think most countries have
21:35as to what's happening in each industry sector,
21:38but they then also create individual learning accounts for anybody across the labor force
21:43to be able to use and deploy themselves
21:44and then couple that up with private sector action.
21:48That kind of thinking, I think, is something that most governments will now have to adopt.
21:52Do you want to comment on that, Becky?
21:54Because it feels as if you don't have the right policy landscape,
21:58then you've got challenges.
21:59You've got it on the employment side.
22:01You've got it at the school side.
22:04I mean, you really need to have the right landscape.
22:06Well, I think it's going to have to be public and private enterprise,
22:10education coming together.
22:11I had a dinner here in Paris last night with one of the educators,
22:15one of the local universities, and he was asking me,
22:18what are you seeing on the future of skilling?
22:21And the truth is, it's going to take universities too.
22:24We have to change what we're teaching.
22:26We might have to help with some transition.
22:28But I would also say that companies have to make sure we're helping our workforce move along.
22:33We don't have the population growth in most of the world that we used to have.
22:36And so the idea of I'm going to exit this employee
22:39and go find a brand new shiny one with the skills, that no longer exists.
22:43We're going to have to reskill and retrain and upskill the population we have.
22:47And policy is important and government can help,
22:49but companies have to lead the way.
22:51I just want to close out on a positive note,
22:54something that we were talking about backstage.
22:57A couple of the founders here that have been attending VivaTech for many years
23:01have been people that have come from working for a small number of years in technology
23:09only to become the potential next champions of Europe.
23:14And one of those companies was Mistral AI.
23:17You had some points to make about this and what the career path can now look like.
23:21Yes.
23:21I think one of the things that AI is giving us is capability
23:25and also belief of this disintermediation of experience.
23:28So it's not what I grew up to be.
23:30It's what I can actually do.
23:32And that becomes the limitation versus your education or your job title.
23:36What do you have the capability and the courage to actually take on?
23:41And AI helps with that, but it also creates a landscape of belief
23:45that you can, you can do something.
23:47In fact, I would say belief matters as much as ability right now.
23:50Which is a very different American dream.
23:52It's a very different American dream.
23:54Sadi, do you want to talk about that?
23:55Because it's incredible who you're going to be inviting
23:57to the World Economic Forum to be on stage
23:59may not be someone who's been in industry for 30 or 40 years anymore.
24:03I mean, this is why we have been working with technology pioneers, unicorns, innovators,
24:10and often trying to spot some of those early stage companies
24:14who have these great ideas, help connect them,
24:17and they're often the future very large job creators.
24:21So we've been tracking this for about 10 or 15 years now.
24:24These companies, once they get bigger,
24:26have the possibility to create a lot of opportunity for the people around them.
24:31So again, it's important to watch that.
24:33I fully agree with you there.
24:35So any predictions?
24:37As we talk about the labor market, we talk about employment opportunities,
24:41clearly in a hugely disruptive phase,
24:43announcement after announcement on frontier models
24:45that have been released and then only to be disabled.
24:48In 12 months' time, what are we going to be talking about
24:50when it comes to the labor market?
24:51Yeah, I think in 12 months' time,
24:53we'll see more change in the underlying structure.
24:57But, you know, a final comment is, bet on humanity.
25:00Humans have gone through transformations in the past.
25:03Always there's been net job gain.
25:05Is it going to happen at this time?
25:07I believe in your research.
25:08I believe it is.
25:10But belief matters.
25:11And so we have to believe that we as humans are going to navigate this.
25:15I think it's really important that we see the signal among all the noise.
25:19And I think focusing on the fundamentals
25:21and for leaders to take the time to think through
25:24how can this technology support my workforce,
25:28learn the lessons from the past,
25:30displacement and trying to buy the talent off the market
25:33is just no longer going to be a strategy that works.
25:35So focusing on the fundamentals.
25:37Sadio, Becky, thank you so much for joining us here at Viva Tech.
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