His vision centers on the idea that the future will bring the opportunity for humans to perform more creative tasks than they do today, even for better wages. To have a place in that dynamic and demanding job market, people will need to be trained every four years, while academic institutions will need to teach for "the skills of the future rather than the history of the past," he said. Walsh visited Montevideo to speak at a Deloitte global event. Here is a summary of his talk with El Empresario.
Some analysts warn about the destruction of jobs over job creation as a result of automation and new technologies. You have a different, more positive approach, you believe that thanks to these advances humans will get better jobs in the future. On what do you base that conclusion?
Yes, I think we will be able to get better jobs, because automation and disruptive technologies will simply replace tasks that machines can already do, thereby freeing up capacity for people to do "more human", more creative work. Robots will never be able to create or replace solutions to problems, use judgment, be empathetic. So, the growth in the use of robots will be high, but humans will decide where automation will go. In the next 10 to 15 years, mechanical work will be replaced, which is generally what humans don't want to do. They want to do tasks where they can use their attributes, traits and skills. So I think - and Deloitte also feels this way - that there is a much more positive future for everyone in what is the fourth industrial revolution.
What skills should people have then?
We have done research and it will require skills linked to problem solving, empathy, judgment, cognitive processing, that only humans can do. Those are the roles that will tend to do a lot more in the future, because machines will replace the high volume of low value-added activities that we have to do today.
«El crecimiento del uso de robots será alto, pero los humanos decidirán adónde irá la automatización. En los próximos 10 o 15 años reemplazará el trabajo mecánico».
He talks about low value-added roles as the ones that will be most affected by these changes. Now, which industries will suffer the most from change?
In reality, I believe that all industries will benefit from disruption and all will experience a transition as we move into the future of work. It's inevitable. I don't think there will be winners and losers, because these new technologies will replace tasks within processes, not replace jobs. That's an important difference. In fact, because of technology, other jobs and roles have already appeared, like the community manager, for example, that didn't exist before. In short, some roles will change and at the same time new ones will continue to emerge.
What types of companies are adapting best to this disruptive era? What do these companies have in common?
It's interesting what you ask, because there aren't really examples of areas where everyone is doing well. The best companies are the ones that are experimenting with new technologies and are building muscle and corporate memory to understand the implications of these developments and how they can best take advantage of them. Clearly, technology companies don't have the corporate history of other traditional organizations, so they are able to start from scratch and it's easier that way. It's much harder for traditional organizations to move into the future of work because they have a legacy system.
Do traditional companies share the optimistic vision you promote?
Right now there are companies, managers and leaders who are probably a little bit confused by what they've heard about automation and don't know how to untangle that to understand what to do next. I think we have a very clear narrative that is basically incentivizing people and organizations to experiment and create that memory and muscle. Now, there's no holy grail; you have to create it for yourself. The more organizations experiment, the more comfortable people will get with these technologies and recognize the opportunities, the use cases. And it's conceivable that in five years 25% of the work done by organizations will be automated, albeit in different ways, because everyone's processes are different.
Es concebible que en cinco años el 25% de los trabajos realizados por las organizaciones será automatizado».
It is to be expected that in addition to impacting the economy in terms of job creation and elimination, automation will also have an impact on wages. What is the outlook?
We did research in the UK where we looked at the impact of technology in the period between 2001 and 2015, and found that technology had caused the loss of 800,000 jobs, but (at the same time) created 3.5 million jobs with an average wage £10,000 higher than before. So, arguably, the future of work will raise wages, not lower them, because many low-level activities will be done by robots.
Deloitte is using sophisticated tools, for example, based on Artificial Intelligence, for talent selection. How is technology redefining the role of the HR department?
For organisations to move towards the 'augmented' workforce, HR also needs to lead by example and introduce disruptive technologies into its services in order to free up more time to add more value to the business, to help it transform for the future of work. Introducing these technologies into HR is no different to what will happen on the production lines and other internal functions, but HR has the opportunity to lead its own function in being more aware and able to support and enable the rest of the business to move forward on the digital journey.
The gigantic volume of data that is used in the researches of consulting firms, doesn't it represent at some point a problem for talent recruiters? How do they turn data into valuable information for decision making?
Synthesizing all this data remains a challenge. The statistic that stands out for me is that only 1% of all the data collected is used. The real value of analyzing, evaluating and using the data is to increase that percentage - from 1% to 30%, 40%, 60% - so that more relevant and useful data is used to make decisions. With the cognitive solution we've been developing, we're trying to reduce the "noise" around the data and focus on the most critical points.
Hoy las consultoras utilizan solo el «1% de todos los datos recopilados. El valor real del análisis, la evaluación y el uso de los datos es aumentar ese porcentaje para que se utilice más data relevante y útil para tomar decisiones».
Given the changing characteristics of work in the future, what will be the "life expectancy" of jobs?
I think careers will extend from 30 or 40 years to 50, 60 and maybe even 70 years over the course of the next few decades. At least that will happen for a generation, as people live longer and as health systems support people living to 100, then careers will clearly extend as well.
What kind of jobs do you imagine the new generations will be doing?
Those who are born today will be doing jobs that they don't know what they are because they haven't even been created yet. And that shows how far things are moving. But those jobs will most likely not be the mechanical kind of jobs, but the human kind of jobs. They'll be very interesting, fulfilling, and maybe that makes a difference to my generation and yours as well, (because) when we entered the job market, we all expected to fill roles where we actually found their workflow pretty boring, filling out our schedule, filling out forms. Machines can do that.
Are educational institutions already preparing young people for that future?
I think the fact that people learn new skills throughout their lives is a sure thing. And in that sense, academic institutions need to teach for the skills of the future rather than the history of the past. I think institutions have a responsibility to think about what skills people need, because they need to learn new skills for the job and (also) keep learning. Secondly, government entities and corporations must recognize that they also have a responsibility to train all people with employability skills on a regular basis. With the half-life of new skills dropping to between 2.5 and 5 years, everyone needs to retrain every four to five years. And I think the best companies to work for in the future will be the ones that have the best learnability and the people who adhere to that, because they are a "learning machine", will get a lifelong benefit. That will become the new employer brand, in my view.
Las instituciones académicas necesitan enseñar para las habilidades del futuro en vez de la historia del pasado».
Some believe that a universal basic income will be needed for those who lose their jobs due to automation. What is your position on this?
To be honest with you, I think it's a way but not the ultimate solution because we believe that the future of work will create massive opportunities for everyone. And it's up to the government to figure out how to tax the economy, those who work full time, but there are also a lot of freelancers and contractors, so they're taxed differently. You need to pay for public services, so you need a way to tax them fairly. Universal basic income seems like an unrefined tool to solve the robot problem. How do you solve the problem called natural language processing and machine learning? How do you tax an app that's on your phone? It's very difficult. And the other idea was to give everyone an income of about 600 euros. But how do you implement that? It's a solution but it's based on the idea that the increase of robots is going to eliminate jobs and we don't believe that.
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