By Carmelo Cennamo, Program Director, and Isidora Karanović, Executive Director, Reshaping Work
The debate about AI, and the technology’s impact on jobs, is primarily about number estimates: how many jobs are, or will in the near future, be affected by it, how many will be automated and how many will be augmented thanks to the use of the technology. This numbers exercise is common to every technological revolution; we pose the same set of questions: how many jobs will disappear, how many will appear, and how fast.
Those are fair questions. But, they are not necessarily the most interesting one – or the most meaningful to ask. What we, at Reshaping Work, have learned over ten years of conferences, research and occasionally heated roundtables around the transformation impact of digital technologies is that the real story lies in how work quietly gets reorganized around a new technology. Which parts of a job come to define professional worth, and which fall away without anyone noticing; which tasks are redefined and which processes remain stable; what degrees of autonomy is granted in performing tasks and about what parts of the job; who decides; and who is accountable when something goes wrong. And, critically, how does the role and identity of workers change when interacting with the technology.
Those are the questions we see as significant for the understanding of AI-driven changes of work, and how to put back humans at the center of the process, as leading actors of the technological transformations rather than targets. We have built this year’s conference around those questions, and the reason why we called it The Human Frontier.
Three reasons we think you’ll benefit from spending two days of your November calendar with us:
1. The room is the argument
Almost every organisation is now running its own internal conversation about AI. Very few of those conversations include everyone who has a stake in the outcome. Ours does, by design. In the same programme, you will find Brando Benifei from the European Parliament and Chiara Riondino from the European Commission alongside Stefano Perego of Amazon, Maria Apazoglou of Zurich Insurance and Maud Sacquet of LinkedIn — and, in the same discussions, Klaus Heeger of CESI, Victor Bernhardtz of Unionen, Uma Rani from the ILO and Stijn Broecke from the OECD.
We do not put these people in one room hoping they will agree. We do it because the arguments that surface when they don’t are the ones worth having, and because they rarely happen anywhere else. This is Reshaping Work’s unique value proposition since its incipit – facilitating a multistakeholders dialogue around the heated, consequential questions for the future of work.
2. The open, uncomfortable questions is the programme
Our themes this year are deliberately uncomfortable ones! Algorithmic management, treated not as a workplace curiosity but as a form of coordination that quietly redistributes discretion across whole sectors. The shift in professional identity that follows when AI redefines what a person is actually responsible for (which is the thread running through the entire conference). What the concentration of AI capability means for democratic accountability and social cohesion.
And one that deserves more attention than it usually gets: whether healthcare can genuinely move from treating disease to preventing it without losing clinical judgement, trust and equity along the way. It is the clearest test case we know of for everything else on the programme.
Youngjin Yoo of the London School of Economics will walk us through in his keynote the deeper essence of these ongoing AI transformations, while Cristina Alaimo of ESSEC Business School will make us pose and reflect upon the meaning and value of data.
3. You leave with something you can actually use
The roundtables are where the conference stops being a conference. They are small, working sessions, led this year by people such as Enrique Fernández-Macías and Ignacio González-Vázquez from the Joint Research Centre, Angela Plohman of the Mozilla Foundation, Nelleke Groen from the Dutch government, and Maya Noël of France Digitale.
What comes out of them is rarely a conclusion. It is usually something more useful: a sharper version of the problem you arrived with, a framing you hadn’t considered, and exemplars for what you are about to attempt. Participants tend to remember these sessions long after the keynotes, and we suspect that is why.
We are excited about the program and can’t wait to welcome you and orchestrate these important conversations. Also, because this edition marks the tenth anniversary of Reshaping Work activities — more than 2,000 attendees, 250 companies, 200 independent experts and 100 worker organisations –– and achievement we are proud of and would love to share with you all, in Amsterdam, on 12 and 13 November. Join us if you share our excitement for these themes, but also if you think we have got some of this wrong.