The Future of Work in the Age of Generative AI with Professor Joseph Fuller

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Welcome back to the show, everyone. We're exploring how empathy connection purpose are transforming the future of business. I'm Stephen, joined today by my co-hosts, Mike and Tullio and our special guest. So our recent McKinsey report shows that Generative AI could add up to 4.4 trillion annually to the global economy. Yet for leaders, the bigger question isn't just about productivity, profit. It's also about how AI will reshape work, leadership and culture. Today, we're diving into the future of work in the age of Generative AI, with one of the world's leading thinkers on the evolving workplace. Mike, introduce our guest today.

**Mike Liwski** (1:00)
Yeah, we are privileged today to have as our guest Professor Joseph Fuller. He's a Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School. Joe, as well as the co-lead at the Managing the Future of Work Project, and as well, the Harvard Project on the workforce. So both of which are really there to explore how trends that we're going to talk about today, trends like AI, demographic shifts, and even evolving skills are reshaping labor markets. As well, he's the founder and former CEO of Monitor Group, now Monitor Deloitte, and his research has influenced policymakers, executives, and educators around the globe.
Joe, as well, co-hosts the Managing the Future of Work Podcast, which you will definitely want to tune in to that. It's been downloaded over 2.5 million times. So, Professor Fuller, we are so privileged to welcome you to our show. Welcome.

**Joseph Fuller** (2:04)
Well, thank you, Mike, and I'm delighted to be with you and your audience.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:09)
So, Joe, you've described the workforce of being at the intersection of demographic shifts, cultural change, technology disruption. How is generative AI amplifying or accelerating these trends?

**Joseph Fuller** (2:27)
Well, Stephen, that's a pretty involved answer, but let me highlight several things. Well, the first is that AI is now being used by about 50% of the people in the United States, but people are more likely to use it away from work than at work so far. I call that the kind of science project effect, where you have a teenager, they suddenly tell you that they had a science project assigned six weeks ago, and it's due Monday, and you're going to open up OpenAI or Anthropic or Grok and start scrambling.
Companies are adopting AI at a slower rate than we thought they would, even though the technology is getting better at a faster rate than we thought it would. I think that shows one of the several impacts AI is going to have on work, which is, AI is, in my view, the most important technology for big organizations since electricity.
And when you start deploying it in your organization, what you find quickly is that just bolting it on the side of the way you do things now doesn't work very well. You have to rethink the way you're doing things, and reorganize the process to maximize the AI and to build from the AI up, as opposed to bulk the AI on top. That's a big task. And so it's disorienting for organizations. Organizations want quick results. They want things to be simpler. And so they're going slower. Now, there are a couple of other broader societal trends I'd like to mention. One is that in the United States, we have basically a zero-growth population. And we've got pretty lackluster, what's called workforce participation, prime working-age people who are actually seeking work. And AI is going to help address a couple of issues. It really, there are many different numbers banded about. You cited a widely cited McKinsey study. But it is going to make the workforce more productive. And that's really important because economic growth in a country, basically, is only driven by two things, productivity growth and growth of the workforce. So if you have zero-growth workforce, you really need constant productivity growth to drive things. It will enable a lot of people to take on jobs that were foreclosed from them in the past. Everyone focuses on this question of, oh my gosh, it's going to replace some jobs. It absolutely will. There's going to be a significant period of some unease and disruption. But because it's very good at a number of things, which is called, say, statistical analysis, that a lot of people aren't good at or are not confident in their skills. If AI now fulfills that role, and you no longer need to be actual to demonstrate to the employer, you can do that because the AI is going to do it instead of you. It makes the candidate pool of people who are qualified for certain jobs actually bigger. Because it's hard to get credentials no longer a qualification. The final thing is that it really does a lot of parts of work that are dull, dreary, dumb for you. It can really improve the quality of people's work life if they're allowed to be creative with it and put it to its highest and best use.