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Preparing for the Coming Skill Shifts

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Abstract

A clear-eyed look at how AI can complement (rather than eliminate) human jobs, with real-world examples from companies that range from Netflix to Walmart. Descriptions of AI's possible effects on businesses and their employees cycle between utopian hype and alarmist doomsaying. This book from MIT Sloan Management Review avoids both these extremes, providing instead a clear-eyed look at how AI can complement (rather than eliminate) human jobs, with real-world examples from companies that range from Netflix to Walmart. The contributors show that organizations can create business value with AI by cooperating with it rather than relinquishing control to it. The smartest companies know that they don't need AI that mimics humans because they already have access to resources with human capability—actual humans. The book acknowledges the prominent role of such leading technology companies as Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google in applying AI to their businesses, but it goes beyond the FAANG cohort to look at AI applications in many nontechnology companies, including DHL and Fidelity. The chapters address such topics as retraining workers (who may be more ready for change than their companies are); the importance of motivated and knowledgeable leaders; the danger that AI will entrench less-than-ideal legacy processes; ways that AI could promote gender equality and diversity; AI and the global loneliness epidemic; and the benefits of robot–human collaboration. Contributors Cynthia M. Beath, Megan Beck, Joe Biron, Erik Brynjolfsson, Jacques Bughin, Rumman Chowdhury, Paul R. Daugherty, Thomas H. Davenport, Chris DeBrusk, Berkeley J. Dietvorst, Janet Foutty, James R. Freeland, R. Edward Freeman, Julian Friedland, Lynda Gratton, Francis Hintermann, Vivek Katyal, David Kiron, Frieda Klotz, Jonathan Lang, Barry Libert, Paul Michelman, Daniel Rock, Sam Ransbotham, Jeanne W. Ross, Eva Sage-Gavin, Chad Syverson, Monideepa Tarafdar, Gregory Unruh, Madhu Vazirani, H. James Wilson

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... Moreover, process expertise is central to developing more collaborative work relations and integrated outputs (Adler et al., 2008;Gardner, 2016). This is similar to how 'soft' skills are often undervalued and less visible in technical environments (Cardador, 2017) despite growing debate highlighting their importance for the contemporary workplace (e.g., Bughin, 2018 Labels related to organizational structures suffused interactions at PlaneCo in ways that reinforced differences in status and resources. Previous studies also found that experts routinely use language that naturalizes their marginalization and occludes their expertise. ...
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Experts increasingly refine their expertise into specialties as they labour in and around organizations. Yet, previous research assumes that experts are organized in the workplace in ways that passively accommodate or mirror pre-existing specialties and focuses on organizational structures that codify the content of experts' knowledge as an encroachment. Drawing on a qualitative field study in an aeronautical organization's engineering unit, this paper examines the organizational structures that chart the area of experts' knowledge, i.e., their specialties. The findings show that organizational structures are generative, defining the contours of existing expertise and catalysing the formation of new ones (generating). However, organizational structures also encode criteria that implicitly rank some forms of expertise over others, thereby reinforcing status hierarchies (grading), and misalignment across organizational structures renders some forms of expertise invisible (ghosting). By showing the active role of organizational structures in shaping expertise rather than simply housing it, this paper contributes to our understanding of expertise development as well as status dynamics and access to resources among experts. Further, the paper reveals how misalignments across multiple organizational structures may impact the management of knowledge and human capital.
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