How the World of Work Will Change Over the Next 20 Years
未来20年，工作领域将发生怎样的变化？
Five experts look ahead and imagine a future that looks totally different
五位专家展望了工作领域的未来，设想了一个和现在截然不同的前景。
Tara Weiss
塔拉·韦斯
The world of work has experienced seismic shifts throughout the past five years.
过去五年，工作领域发生了翻天覆地的变化。
The pandemic ushered in an era of remote and hybrid work. Conversations once deemed taboo in the workplace, like mental health and shrinking boundaries between work and personal life, have become priorities for employers. People are working past the typical retirement age of 65, which means there are five generations in the workplace, all with different work and management styles.
新冠疫情开启了远程办公和混合办公的新时代。曾被视为职场禁忌的话题如今已成为雇主们的优先事项，比如心理健康以及工作与生活界限的日益模糊。人们的工作年限普遍超过了传统的65岁退休年龄，这意味著有五代人同时在职场打拼，每一代人都有着不同的工作方式和管理风格。
The next two decades will bring even more consequential change, with artificial intelligence driving much of the reshaping of work. It’s already doing tasks once relegated to newly minted college graduates in many professions. It will have an impact on the role of managers, how organizations measure business outcomes and accelerate tasks that once took months.
未来20年将发生更加深远的变化，工作方式的重塑在很大程度上将由人工智能推动。在许多职业岗位，人工智能已经开始承担过去由应届大学毕业生完成的任务。AI将影响管理者的角色、组织机构衡量业务成果的方式并加速完成以往需要耗费数月时间的任务。
With all of this in mind, we asked five workplace experts and practitioners to weigh in on the question: What is the future of work?
带着所有这些想法，我们邀请了五位职场专家和从业者就以下问题发表见解：工作的未来是什么样子？
Data, data, data
数据、数据、数据
AI’s measurement capabilities will dramatically impact the way leaders drive performance. What you measure you can impact, and there’s a well-researched connection between employee well-being and performance.
人工智能的衡量能力将极大地影响领导者提升业绩的方式。你衡量什么，就能影响什么，并且有充分的研究表明，员工福祉与绩效之间存在联系。
Instead of relying solely on self-reported data or sentiment surveys, we’ll start to see real-time signals across the employee experience and we’ll learn more about things like how someone’s working hour to hour, who they’re working with to drive outcomes, whether time or location meaningfully affects performance, or even how communication patterns and influence show up in ways that correlate with results.
我们将不再仅仅依赖员工自行报告的数据或情绪调查，取而代之的是，我们将开始看到贯穿整个员工体验的实时信号，并由此更深入地了解员工每个小时的工作情况、他们与谁合作以推动成果、时间或地点是否对绩效构成重大影响，甚至沟通模式和影响力如何以与业绩相关的方式显现。
Imagine knowing that a salesperson does her best work from 3:15 p.m. to 7 p.m. in New York while a teammate in Portugal performs best during complementary hours. AI-driven systems could reveal these patterns by analyzing output, quality and sales impact, and even integrate optional wellness data employees choose to share themselves from their devices. With these insights, AI agents could align workflows around each person’s natural rhythm, creating high-impact, efficient collaboration.
想象一下，假设我们知道纽约的一位销售人员在下午3点15分至7点之间工作效率最高，而葡萄牙的另一名团队成员则在其他时段表现最佳。AI驱动的系统可以通过分析产出、质量和销售影响来揭示这些模式，甚至可以整合员工自愿通过设备分享的健康数据。洞悉了这些信息之后，AI智能体可以根据每个人的自然节奏调整工作流程，从而实现高强度、高效率的协作。
Today, many chief performance officers are focused on building strong AI governance to protect employee data and ensure privacy. Once that foundation is in place, the next era of work could look entirely different.
如今，许多首席绩效官都致力于构建强大的AI治理体系，以保护员工数据并确保隐私。一旦这个基础建设到位，下一个时代的工作模式可能会截然不同。
A shrinking workforce
劳动力不断缩减
There will be fewer available workers in Europe, Japan and the U.S. over this time frame and the demographic shift will be profound.
在未来20年，欧洲、日本和美国的可用劳动力将会减少，人口结构将发生深刻变化。
In addition, there will be even fewer young adults available for colleges in the U.S., even if they decide the investment is worth it. The implications of this shift will be the need for more investments in vocational and trade schools, and the need to invest in skill-based, not pedigree-based training.
此外，即使年轻人认为上大学是一项值得的投资，可供美国大学招收的年轻人也会变得更少。这种转变意味着需要加大对职业技术学校的投资，并且需要投资于以技能为基础、而非以学历为基础的培训。
There will also be more on-the-job specific training. Companies will become classrooms. Companies that want a more sustainable relationship with employees will need an investment model versus a transactional one: We will invest in your skills so you can be a competitive professional in your domain.
未来还将增加有针对性的在职培训。公司将成为员工的课堂。希望与员工建立更加可持续关系的公司将需要一种投资模式而非交易模式：我们将投资于你的技能，使你成为所在领域的佼佼者。
My colleague, AI
AI将成为我的同事
In 25 years, the workplace will likely be unrecognizable, with employees and AI operating as one. Yes, there will be tasks and entire jobs taken over by AI, but we will all be elevated to a whole new superpower to make critical and creative decisions. The idea that work was once done strictly by people will seem quaint to some. Tasks that took entire teams, and months to complete, will be crunched down to a few minutes, with success measured on metrics we can’t imagine today.
25年后，职场可能变得和如今截然不同，员工和AI将合二为一。诚然，某些任务甚至整个工作岗位将被AI所取代，但我们所有人都将获得极大的提升，拥有全新的超能力来做出关键性和创造性的决策。在一些人看来，工作曾完全由人力完成这种想法将显得古雅。过去需要整个团队耗费数月才能完成的任务将被压缩到几分钟之内，而衡量成功的标准也将是我们今天无法想象的。
The middle layers of management – so central to today’s corporate structure – could be a vestige of the past. The role of the leader too will change, as they directly oversee a collaboration of people and intelligent systems. The attitude toward in-person collaboration is growing and 25 years from now, counterintuitively, I believe face-to-face connection won’t just be indispensable, but invaluable. Emotional intelligence will still set leaders apart. Those who blend empathy with tech savvy will be the ones shaping the future.
中层管理人员——也就是如今企业结构的中坚——或许会成为历史的遗迹。领导者的角色也将发生改变，他们将直接负责人员与智能系统的协作。人们对面对面协作的态度一直在发展变化，而25年后，我认为，与直觉相悖的是，面对面协作不仅不可或缺，而且将是无价的。情商依然是区分杰出领导者的关键。那些兼具同理心和科技素养的领导者将塑造未来。
The power of the gig worker
零工经济从业者的力量
Advances in quantum computing and AI will enable entrepreneurs to reshape industries with a fraction of the resources they have traditionally required.
量子计算和AI领域的进步将使企业家只要动用传统所需资源的一小部分就能重塑行业。
In similar fashion, democratized access to AI will power the gig economy, making it easier for companies to engage with skilled contractors as needed. Democratized access to AI tools has resulted in talent oftentimes having access to more powerful tools outside companies and being more adept at using them. For example, companies who are Microsoft clients will likely limit usage to MS Copilot given their need to realize a return on their license fees while a gig worker has the option of using the full suite of tools and capabilities of OpenAI, Google or Anthropic. This will result in greater value being delivered by gig workers than ever before.
同样地，AI的普及将推动零工经济的发展，使企业更容易根据需要聘用技能娴熟的自由职业者。AI工具的大众化使得人才往往能够接触到企业外部更强大的工具并且更加熟练地使用它们。例如，微软（Microsoft）的客户企业出于实现许可费用投资回报的需要，可能会将工具使用范围限制在微软Copilot，而零工经济从业者则可以选择使用OpenAI、谷歌（Google）或Anthropic的全套工具和功能。这将使零工经济从业者创造的价值比以往任何时候都更高。
In with the generalists
与通才携手
The nature of work will shift toward generalist roles that value the ability to make connections, work across organizational silos and demonstrate creativity in problem-solving.
工作的性质将向通才型角色转变，这类角色重视人际交往能力、跨组织部门合作的能力以及在解决问题时展现出创造力的能力。
Management practices will focus less on planning and forecasting and more on agility. This will result in a reduction in strategic planning, operational planning and analytics roles and emergence of new roles in areas like scenario modeling and change activation. We will also see an increase in investment in building leadership capabilities broadly across all employees to enable the kind of rapid action at the edges of the organization that will be required in this new disrupted era.
管理实践将减少对计划和预测的关注，而更加注重行动的敏捷性。这将导致战略筹划、运营规划和分析之类的岗位减少，并催生出情景建模和变革激活等领域的新岗位。我们还将看到，企业将加大对全体员工领导力培养的投入，从而让组织边缘能够采取这一颠覆性新时代所需的快速行动。
