Want AI-Driven Productivity? Redesign Work
To capitalize on the promises of artificial intelligence, leaders need to deconstruct jobs and processes, redeploy work, and reconstruct new ways of operating.
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There’s huge potential to reshape work, thanks to democratized access to opportunities (through gig platforms and agile ways of operating) and major advances in technology (particularly artificial intelligence). Only through a concerted effort that involves deconstructing, redeploying, and reconstructing work tasks will organizations be able to fundamentally redesign work processes to achieve both agility and productivity.
The traditional structures that once defined work — fixed jobs, rigid processes, and narrowly defined roles — are crumbling under the weight of change. For centuries, the relationship between cost (or price) and volume has shaped work’s economic calculus. Organizations operated on a model where productivity growth was tied to the availability and cost of employed labor. But democratized access to work through gig platforms and agile ways of operating, coupled with major advances in technology — particularly and most profoundly artificial intelligence — is reshaping work across industries.
In the process, many businesses are struggling to realize the productivity gains promised by those changes — not because they lack the technology but because they are failing to rethink and redesign the underlying structures of work itself. This is especially true when it comes to reenvisioning work to incorporate AI’s possibilities.
Many companies remain trapped in outdated work models and processes. Work is still structured according to rigid job roles rather than as a fluid system of tasks that can be both tackled and optimized across human and machine capabilities. This misalignment prevents organizations from fully harnessing AI’s potential to unlock new efficiencies and thus limits productivity gains and creates unintended workforce disruptions.
To capitalize on AI, organizations must move beyond a simple binary narrative of substituting technology for the work that is currently being done by employees and embrace a fundamental redesign of work. Only with a concerted effort to deconstruct, redeploy, and reconstruct work will companies be able to achieve new levels of agility, scalability, and productivity. This involves taking a “work-backward” approach rather than a “tech-forward” approach: Instead of focusing on how technology can be applied to existing jobs and processes to eliminate human work, leaders must deconstruct existing and emerging tasks to understand which activities can be substituted, augmented, or transformed. Once they redeploy those activities to the optimal solutions, they will be on their way to reconstructing an entirely new way of working.
The Changing Economics of Work
Historically, the economics of work have been defined by the law of supply and demand: As prices (wages) rise, the demand for labor declines. On the other side, higher wages incentivize an increased supply of labor.