Editorial by Managing Director Alexander De Beir
Welcome back, Ulysses
Imagine that you have been gone for twenty years and that you are now returning to your professional space. In 2006, ADM was born. At that time, in the workplace, there was no question of artificial intelligence. YouTube and Twitter had just been born, Instagram and TikTok were not even in the minds of their creators yet. Blackberry was ubiquitous, the iPhone still non-existent. Clouds only carried rain, USBs and CD-ROMs were used to store your files. Officially barely recognised, teleworking only concerned 5% of workers.
20 years later, the professional world has changed a lot, starting with the advent of the project economy and the interim management that goes hand in hand with it. What if we were to jump forward 20 years, just enough time to awaken your imagination? Heading for 2046! How do you see your work in 20 years? No, this time, don’t use AI to project an answer but think for yourself.
Let’s start with your workplace. Or rather, your workplaces. You just finished your meeting in your flying taxi or the driverless car that takes you to a physical coworking activity, who knows, in space? Perhaps the intellectual activity generated may even have been transformed into clean energy? Dynamic hybrid systems will allow you to operate in the most efficient way, no matter where you are, and who knows, perhaps even with a positive impact on the environment.
And your colleagues? Well, that’s strange, none of them have a job title anymore. The roles are fluid and project-oriented. Employees, and especially freelancers (the majority!), are contracted according to their specific talents. You salute a human team member, who, like you, stands out for his creativity, his ability to nuance and contextualize. Together, you oversee the growth estimate based on very sharp statistics that your AI agent presents to you. This is called Human & Machine Synergy. The machine has long since moved from simple automation to the reinforcement (augmentation) of human capacities, the so-called “great cognitive shift”.
You make a young colleague smile by talking about time sheets, a term they’ve never heard of. He knows that he works according to a trust-based hour system in a context of radical flexibility.
You have both been able to present a profile that corresponds to the increased corporate reliance on specialized, on-demand gig experts for specific strategic initiatives. Contractors, interim managers, external experts: you are part of the work models of tomorrow.
