Lucy, the strategy team and Ministers at the UK Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) invited Matthew to give their honorary keynote, on the future of the UK's workforce and the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on jobs and knowledge economy workers.
Titled the Future Workforce, the session ran for about twenty minutes followed by a lengthy Q&A, so Matthew focused on three topics, each with a twist: future business models, the upsides of automation, and work from anywhere.
"One of the greatest upsides of automation is using these same tools to unlock huge amounts of human potential and democratise access to skills."Matthew Griffin, United Kingdom, February 2023
He opened with new business models that will directly change how companies operate and go to market, and therefore how they hire and employ people. These included the evolution of the gig economy and the emergence of distributed and autonomous organisations, the latter of which need no employees to operate.
On automation, he acknowledged the downside most people associate with it, mass redundancies, but showed that one of its greatest upsides is using the same tools to unlock huge amounts of human potential and democratise access to skills. He showed Ministers the book he and his son wrote in under 12 hours with ChatGPT and MidJourney, and discussed what these technologies mean for jobs, hiring, training, re-skilling, the economy and tax revenues.
Finally, he showed how even surgeons and construction workers can now do their jobs from home as 5G and robotics bring tele-operations into the spotlight. His closing point was that work from anywhere no longer applies only to salespeople with a laptop and a mobile connection.
