Key thinkers - the future of work
How do we reimagine work and businesses in the age of AI?
If you want to think seriously about what AI is doing to the structure of businesses and the future of work, these are seven thought-provoking players.
For each one of them I'll give you: who they are, what they're known for, a line in their own words, and where to find more. The first five (strictly six because one is a pair!) are the core reading. And a bonus two for the real swots.
The people to be paying attention to:
Amy Webb · Ethan Mollick · Daron Acemoglu · Joshua Gans · Kai Riemer and Sandra Peter · Kai-Fu Lee · Ravin Jesuthasan
1. Amy Webb – foresight
What's coming and how should leaders prepare?
Status check: Founder and CEO, Future Strategy Today Group, Adjunct Professor Strategy and Foresight, NYU Stern School of Business.
Author of The Signals are Talking and The Big Nine.
In a Nutshell: Webb pioneered a data-driven, quantative apporach to strategic foresight and recently replaced her annual trend report with The Convergence Outlook. One of the world's most respected voices in analysing the collision of tech, capital, geopolitics, climate and human behaviour.
Words: "The greatest threat to any organisation isn't disruption from the outside. It's the refusal to destroy from within."
Link: https://ftsg.com/convergence/
Substack: amywebbfuturist.substack.com .
2. Ethan Mollick - work
What does AI actually do to someone's work today?
Status check: Assoc Professor of Management, Wharton School. Co-Director, Wharton Generative AI Labs.
Author of NYT bestseller Co-Intelligence.
In a Nutshell: What does AI do to knowledge work today? Theories tested through practice in the classroom and workplaces, rather than forecasts. Mollick sees jobs as bundles of tasks. Which survive and which are replaced by AI?
Words: "My rule of thumb is that you need about 10 hours with a Frontier Model to get your head around it."
Links: https://mgmt.wharton.upenn.edu/profile/emollick/
Substack: One Useful Thing — oneusefulthing.org
3. Daron Acemoglu - economics
Who benefits from AI, and why is that a choice rather than a forecast?
Status check: 2024 Nobel laureate in Economics, Institute Professor MIT.
In a Nutshell: Acemoglu argues that whether a technology makes workers more or less valuable isn't something you predict. It's decided by the choices companies, investors and governments make about how to use it. Right now the default choice is automation, replacing what people do. That default starves the alternative of investment: using the same technology to make people better at their jobs, or to give them new work they couldn't do before.
Words: "Pro-worker technolgies are technoligies that make human skills and expertise more valuable."
Co-author, Building Pro-Worker Artificial Intelligence
Links: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/building-pro-worker-ai/
4. Joshua Gans - organisations 🇦🇺
Why doesn't simply bolting AI onto today's organisation capture its value?
Status check: Aussie economist and Professor of Strategic Management and Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair of technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.
Co-author Prediction Machines and Power and Prediction with Ajay Agrawal and Avi Goldfarb.
In a Nutshell: What happens to an organisation when the cost of prediction collapses? Point and application solutions improve a procedure but ignore the system that sits around it. Real value lies in system-level innovation.
Words: "For AI adoption to be successful, you need to have a system mindset as opposed to a task mindset; a focus on value creation as opposed to cost savings based on labour replacement."
Cool chat: The Economy Stupid, "Will AI really take our jobs?" ABC.
Substack: joshuagans.substack.com
5. Kai Riemer and Sandra Peter — people and skills 🇦🇺
What skills, leadership and work design does an AI-enabled organisation actually require?
Status check: Professor and Associate Professor University of Sydney Business School. Co-Directors of Sydney Executive Plus.
Co-authors, the annual Skills Horizon report.
In a Nutshell: What capability an organisation actually needs once AI is in the building. Their three-year University of Sydney research programme with major Australian employers, Ashurst Perkins Coie, Commonwealth Bank, Deloitte and Telstra, launched July 2026, examines what a successful leader looks like in the age of AI, upskilling and work design strategy, and the effect of AI on productivity, work experience and identity.
Words: "The idea is that in this disorienting world where you can't distinguish insight from slop, there's never enough data to make good decisions. You need to do less with more. What they really need is taste. So I think in the age of AI, you will need taste much like we always needed critical thinking."
Listen: The Unlearn Project podcast. https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-unlearn-project/id1576462050
6. Kai-Fu Lee
Status check: Founder and CEO, 01.AI. Chairman and CEO, Sinovation Ventures. Formerly President of Google China, with senior roles at Microsoft and Apple. PhD, Carnegie Mellon. Author of AI Superpowers and AI 2041 with Chen Qiufan.
His new book AI Native: The Mandate to Transform Your Company, drops as ebook 15 September 2026, hardcover 3 November..
In a Nutshell: The Chinese AI ecosystem and what large-scale deployment does to white-collar work. His four waves framework is a clean way to think about sequence, and he rejects universal basic income as the answer to displacement?
Link: https://www.aisuperpowers.com/
7. Ravin Jesuthasan
Status check: Executive Fellow at Kellogg, Senior Partner and Global Leader for Transformation Services, Mercer. Member of the World Economic Forum steering committee on work and employment.
Author of Work Without Jobs: How to Reboot Your Organization's Work Operating System with John Boudreau, a Wall Street Journal bestseller, and Reinventing Jobs.
In a Nutshell: Deconstructing jobs into tasks, skills and projects, then rebuilding the work across automation, internal talent marketplaces and external talent. He calls it a new work operating system. A practitioner rather than an academic, so the material is written for people who have to implement something.
Link: https://www.workwithoutjobs.com/
ONE LAST THING
The annual PwC AI Jobs Barometer makes for fascinating reading.
It analyses over one billion job ads across 27 countries, reporting how AI is reshaping everything from job requirements to wages and skill requirements across major industries.
It suggests there is a two-track labour market emerging with the gap between those tracks widening at a faster pace than many experts predicted.
One track: professionalised roles, (radiologists, talent recruiters), where AI handles the routine so workers can focus on human skills - shrewd judgment, creativity, expertise.
The other: democratised roles, (IT service, medical secretarial), where AI simplifies the work itself, reducing the premium on deep, human expertise.
Salary growth in professional roles 42% above democratised over the last 5 years.
https://www.pwc.com.au/services/artificial-intelligence/ai-jobs-barometer.html
