Managing director, World Economic Forum
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Zahidi, who leads the World Economic Forum’s Centre for the New Economy and Society, has conducted extensive research into technology and jobs, including for the Forum’s 2023 Future of Jobs Report. The large-scale project—which contains perspectives from 803 companies from around the world—includes trends on technology adoption, finding that over 75% of companies are looking to adopt big data, cloud computing, and AI in the next five years. (According to the report, most technologies are predicted to be net job creators over the next five years. The two exceptions: humanoid robots and non-humanoid robots.)
Right now, Zahidi’s biggest curiosity about the future of work is “how three megatrends—AI, decarbonization and geoeconomic disruption—will impact the geography, quality, volume, and task composition of jobs,” she tells Charter. When it comes to the year ahead, she thinks leaders should be focused on making reskilling and upskilling programs “scalable, functional, and replicable.”