Human Resource Executive

Conference & Exposition® in September when she moderates “How HR Leaders Are Using AI to Transform the Employee Experience.” The panel discussion will feature best practices by HR leaders who have adopted AI solutions, and who can offer a forecast on how AI is primed to revolutionize the future of the workplace.

Meister sat down with HRE to discuss what HR leaders should be doing now to get ready for these transformations.

What is your response to the
doomsday predictions that automation
is going to take over the workforce
and eliminate scores of jobs?

I believe the opposite is true. We have to develop an awareness and strategy around how AI will complement and augment many

The technology of today is transforming the workplaces of tomorrow, says Jeanne Meister, founding partner of HR advisory and research firm Future Workplace. From chatbots to digital assistants, AI is disrupting every aspect of how we work. Many of the changes AI is ushering in will transform how HR recruits and engages with employees, and will even alter the basic composition of the ideal HR leader, Meister says. In The Future Workplace Experience, Meister and co-author Kevin Mulcahy laid out a roadmap for how HR professionals can embrace AI and automation to foster success in themselves, their employees and their organizations.

Meister will delve into this topic
again at HRE’s HR Technology
doomsday predictions that many jobs
will be automated away but the more
recent predictions—I’m thinking of
McKinsey—said that 60 percent of all
jobs will have at least 30 percent of
their activities that will be automated;
the issue isn’t that jobs will go away,
but rather, how we work will change,
and some percentage of our activities
will be automated.

That really puts a focus for HR departments on looking at which roles these are and what their strategy is for upskilling. Somewhere between 75 million and 370 million people may need to switch jobs by 2030 due to automation, but upskilling is the right focus—whole categories of jobs will not totally go away. Some are at greater risk than others but we can get caught in the hysteria while the real issue is how we use AI to complement and augment our work.