Despite groundbreaking advances in technology and innovation, productivity growth is sluggish at 1.4 percent. Growth and median household income could subsequently rely on an easy equation. “I have the number of my workers and my output per worker,” explains Kweilin Ellingrud, director of the McKinsey Global Institute. “Either I change the number of workers, which is difficult because of the aging population, or I invest in technology and AI and change the equation of my output per worker.”
More technology, used properly, could be the only solution to return to a better productivity growth rate, said Ellingrud, who spoke during a panel at McKinsey’s Media Day in New York on Thursday. Accordingly, it’s gone time to take AI seriously, whatever the industry, she said.
Brooke Weddle, a senior McKinsey partner who spoke alongside Ellingrud, said the productivity query begins and ends with what she calls “organizational health.” For her, this describes an organization’s ability to “align on a strategy, translate it into the work environment, execute on it, and renew itself over time through innovation and increased customer focus.”
According to McKinsey latest research report On the State of AI, also released Thursday, the link between the health of organizations and their performance is “as strong as ever,” Weddle said. “To achieve productivity gains, it is important to manage the organization more effectively from the top.”
That means jobs could have to evolve. Between now and 2030, the U.S. business landscape will undergo major disruption, leading to “about 12 million” profession changes, Ellingrud said. Some of those changes could have positive effects, too: There might be more jobs in a couple of industries, including health care, construction and education.
However, a big a part of this upheaval might be “dramatic job cuts,” she predicted. About 85 percent of the company restructurings McKinsey has observed fall into 4 categories, Ellingrud explained: administrative support, customer support or sales, food service, and production and manufacturing.
“These four jobs will sort of disappear and drive change,” Ellingrud said. “We talk about generative AI because it changes the nature of our work – it will affect about 30% of what we do, but our jobs will not disappear as a result. But for these four categories, it will.”
The signs have been on the wall for a while. An entire range of office jobs will soon “decrease enormously,” said Joseph Fuller, professor at Harvard Business School and co-director of the “Managing the Future of Work” initiative. Assets last summer. “I don’t want to be someone who reads business books or summarizes them to send out 20-page summaries, because AI is already really good at summarizing.”
Nigel Vaz, CEO of Publicis Sapient, a consultancy specialising in digital transformation, recently said: Assets He believes there’s “not going to be a job that isn’t going to involve AI in some form or another in a very significant way, even in the next five years, in the next year or two – I mean that seriously.” Whether you are a janitor, a security guard or a designer, you are not immune. “AI is going to be used in every one of these areas, even if you don’t know it,” Vaz said.
In addition, a recent report by Goldman Sachs found that continued developments in generative AI could add nearly $7 trillion to global GDP and increase productivity growth by 1.5 percentage points over the subsequent decade.
The only strategy to sustain yourself when working in any of the industries Ellingrud mentioned by name is to repeatedly unlearn and relearn key skills, including technological ones. According to Vaz, this is basically because AI is “probably the biggest change humanity has experienced since the wheel or electricity.” In other words, it is not the form of innovation you possibly can just sit out.
