By Tara Weiss
The world of work has experienced seismic shifts throughout the past five years.
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.
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.
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?
Data, data, data
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Cara Brennan Allamano, a former chief people officer at Lattice, an HR software platform, and co-founder of People Tech Partners, a group of HR leaders working to bring recruiting tools to the marketplace
A shrinking workforce
There will be fewer available workers in Europe, Japan and the U.S. over this time frame and the demographic shift will be profound.
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.
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.
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Peter Fasolo, a former executive vice president and chief human resources officer at Johnson & Johnson, and director of the Human Resource Policy Institute at Boston University's Questrom School of Business
My colleague, AI
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.
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.
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Alan Guarino, vice chairman and CEO of board services at the global consulting firm Korn Ferry
The power of the gig worker
Advances in quantum computing and AI will enable entrepreneurs to reshape industries with a fraction of the resources they have traditionally required.
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.
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Ravin Jesuthasan, senior partner and global leader of transformation services at the consulting firm Merce
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In with the generalists
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.
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.
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Gaurav Gupta, a managing director and head of research and development at the management consulting firm Kotter International
Tara Weiss is a writer in New York. She can be reached at reports@wsj.com.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 20, 2025 10:00 ET (15:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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