With endless conversations about AI’s promise at Toronto Tech Week, fewer conversations focused on how the technology is shaking up the labour market.
At an event hosted by professional development consultancy Re-Work, tech workers, academics, and founders debated how AI is set to change workers’ relationships to their jobs. Doing some tasks faster and more efficiently with AI will prompt people to redefine what they consider “productivity,” the panellists said, and could open time up for more creative pursuits. But who ends up being able to benefit from that extra time might not be evenly distributed.
“I think our idea of what work is in the future drastically shifts,” Christopher Wilson, doctoral candidate in cultural studies at Queen’s University, artist, and researcher, said on stage on Tuesday. “Because now we are starting to focus on the things that we value in our lives.”
Several tech leaders, including Cohere’s Nick Frosst, have advanced the viewpoint that AI automation of administrative tasks will give people back time for creative pursuits. However, early research suggests that workers that get more done more quickly using AI, will likely have more work assigned rather than hours reduced..
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To Saurabh Suri, founder of agentic AI consultancy Red Bricks Labs, the technology automating mundane tasks will open up space to do more meaningful work. But at the same time, jobs where all someone does is manage an AI agent are “already happening.” In the future, “we’re going to become managers of agents,” Suri said.
The potential additional drudgery that AI could introduce (managing agents that are managing your inbox, instead of just managing your inbox) might make entrepreneurship seem all the more attractive. For the self-employed who set their own schedules, using agents to coordinate tasks while carving out more time for creative projects is more realistic, Ramona Sartipi,an IBM design lead and a tech community organizer, told BetaKit.
“Entrepreneurs are becoming a lot more desirable as a job,” Sartipi said, as securing a role at a large company has become less of a stable option.
Over the past year, companies have made layoffs tied to the introduction of AI in their businesses. To Janice Liu, CEO of data and marketing consultancy Mantis Group AI, this is a purposeful decision made by executives to blame the job cuts on technological disruption, rather than overhiring during the pandemic—a viewpoint echoed by researchers and industry folks.
“We’re all scared of something we made up in our heads. AI is not taking our jobs,” she said.
Re-Work co-founder Chantae Allick, who moderated the panel, told BetaKit that for people to get the time-saving benefits of AI, there would have to be a “large-scale shift” in perspective about what qualifies as work. She’d also want to see legislation in place that protects people from overwork that AI could enable.
“Our relationship to the world and to work is going to change. But it’s not going to be day and night.”
Janice Liu, Mantis Group AI
“We as employees, we as workers can say no,” Allick said. “We can start to make a push to say, this is too much,” adding that labour unions have a role to play in how AI shapes work. Canada’s AI minister, Evan Solomon, said last month he would create an AI and Labour Advisory Council after meeting with union leaders.
These possibilities are staked on widespread adoption of the technology, which, in Canada, is lagging compared to global peers. Through Red Brick Labs, Saurabh said he feels a “level of friction” when he’s asked to help companies integrate AI, particularly in traditional, non-tech industries. According to a recent report by Georgian, 44 percent of executives at large, growing Canadian B2B software companies said that their firms had adopted agentic AI; compared to 67 percent across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel.
With that slow adoption, the upheaval with how people see work will take longer than a product update. “Our relationship to the world and to work is going to change,” Liu said. “But it’s not going to be day and night.”
BetaKit is the official media partner for Toronto Tech Week.
Feature image courtesy Toronto Tech Week.