Foresight Friday : Olivia Houghton, insights and engagement director : AI & Billionaires
Every Friday, we offer an end-of-week wrap-up of the topics, issues, ideas and virals we’re all talking about.
This week, insights and engagement director, Olivia Houghton explores what AI really means for the talent pipeline and why billionaires buying dinosaur bones might require a protection strategy.
: At SXSW, a panel asked, ‘When AI does the work, what do humans do next?’
Justina Nixon-Saintil, chief impact officer at IBM, argued that in an AI-augmented environment, work won’t stay neatly within job descriptions. AI agents cut across multiple disciplines, meaning people who can operate in various domains will be better placed to manage and collaborate than specialists working in silos. This points to the rise of the generalist.
Beyond this, agility, collaboration, continuous learning and emotional intelligence were framed as more important in an AI-augmented environment. The tech skills are the baseline, but the power skills are the differentiator.
Nixon-Saintil also cautioned against short-termism when hiring. IBM announced it is tripling entry-level recruitment in the US, and argued that when senior people retire, you need junior staff who are already embedded alongside them to absorb the judgment, context and institutional knowledge that no tool can transfer.
: Elsewhere, we have been tracking how the index of time is filtering into concepts throughout lifestyle sectors, with luxury a key example. In an upcoming report, we explore how the materiality of objects is becoming increasingly important to luxury consumers. This collided with articles I was seeing of billionaires collecting dinosaur artefacts, almost as the ultimate expression of time made physical – objects that are genuinely irreplaceable, scientifically significant and increasingly treated as status assets.
It did make me think that as more pieces enter private hands, less data reaches science, so should there be a protection strategy for objects of time?
Quote of the week
‘Generalists are actually going to become even more important’
Justina Nixon‑Saintil, chief impact officer, IBM