Business as Unusual – the future of work is now

Rapid technological innovation, globalization, demographic shifts, climate change and geopolitical transformations are having an unprecedented impact on the labour markets around the world and now with the ILO predicting that half the global workforce could lose their jobs because of Covid-19, the shock to the labour market is even more colossal.

The global pandemic has forced enterprises to fundamentally change the way they do business, accelerating existing trends in remote working and fast-tracking the adoption of AI. This combined with the current social disruptions demanding for, amongst other things, a more equitable diverse workforce, we are facing challenges which need to be addressed more urgently than ever before.

In an effort to transform this current challenge into an opportunity, it has never been more urgent for what we at Unreasonable FUTURE term the enablers (those ventures democratizing the future of work and how every individual finds their place in it) and disruptors (those ventures redefining industries or creating entirely new workforce opportunities through innovation, technology, and evolution of how work is conducted) to work together to find solutions addressing these critical issues.

The suggested panel will look at the ongoing debate on whether AI will displace or create jobs, what the implications of increased automation of the workforce are, how can collaborative machine to people workflows be forged? It will address how businesses can continue to innovate when faced with significant budget cuts? How do you “de-bias” the system and leverage the technology that will democratize data without displacing jobs further?  How can organisations counter immediate skill deficiencies, reskill, upskill and redeploy workers and also predict future needs and much more.