Data on the Future of Work

Welcome to another edition of the best damn newsletter in AI. Here we’ll break down AI topics that matter, open your mind to use cases, and keep you ahead of the curve.

Our #1 goal is to be useful. So please shoot us an email 📩 if you have questions or feedback, and especially if you implement something we share!

Here's what we're covering today:

• An exploration of the future of work

• A must-attend event for AI Engineers

• Google unveiled a lot of new things this week

Let’s get to it! 👇

TODAY'S PERSPECTIVE

The future of work as the cost of execution goes to zero

What will happen to 'work' as AI begins doing more of it for us?

We've been rereading Bain's "The Working Future" report and in today’s send, we’re going to share one line of thinking.

The average number of hours worked per week has decreased through every major industrial/technical revolution so far

Each of these dips correlates to technology that changed how we work...

- Assembly lines in the early 1900s

- Photocopiers, computers, etc. in the late 1900s

But the distribution of hours worked has actually flipped

According to Bain's report, while the top 10% of earners in the US work less today than their 1800s counterpart... the top 10% used to work the least, and now they work the most (small margin, but interesting nonetheless).

In today's world, people who earn the most tend to work the most.

Which brings us to what will happen to “work”, especially Knowledge Work

First, if you think of Knowledge Work as a combination of Strategy + Execution

Sometimes the same person does strategy and execution. Oftentimes, one person does strategy and one person or a team does execution.

Do we value the wrong things in work today?

"Execution is everything" is said a lot.

What if that's wrong?

Execution is crucial, but not because it's everything; because it's often the most challenging aspect to get right. If execution were easy and inexpensive, the true value would lie in the strategy itself.

And we spend a lot of execution energy on the wrong things today 👇

The average knowledge worker spends ~30% of their time on email

The Bain report had this stat, McKinsey has shared similar stats.

Email is potentially the lowest ROI execution we do at the moment. And we spend an egregious amount of time doing it.

What will the next shift hold?

All technical revolutions take advantage of the fact that something is cheap.

With AI, the next cheap resource is execution.

AIX COURSES

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CONFERENCE ALERT 📆 

For the AI Engineers

We talk about AI Operations a lot here at The AI Exchange.

Well, the emerging AI Engineer category is the intersection of AI/ML and code: where software engineers can easily access & implement powerful AI models with just an API. Andrej Karpathy believes that "there's probably going to be significantly more AI Engineers than there are ML engineers / LLM engineers."

The AI Engineer Summit congregates 500 technical founders, software engineers, and others who are actively tinkering with and shipping AI-native & AI-enhanced features, apps, and companies. Join the network & conversation in San Francisco October 8 - 10, 2023!

I'll be there as well so message me if you want to get together at the event or in the evening. Check out the full lineup of speakers (insane tbh) and apply to attend or get a free remote ticket at https://ai.engineer/summit

LINKS

For your reading list 📚

Google dropped all sorts of big news this week…

• Google’s Duet AI can now draft your whole email for you. 🙏 hopefully this means email is going away soon?

• Google made more of Vertex AI’s generative AI features more readily available

• Google added an invisible watermark to their AI generated images and is ready for you to break it

Meanwhile…

• Venture capitalists continue pouring dollars into AI startups and startup operators are even thinking about the implications AI will have on what it means to build a lean startup; this high level article was interesting

• Autonomous vehicle company Cruise is expanding its network to support Seattle and Washington DC. We rode in one a few weeks back; it’s really freakin awesome.

And if you’re really nerdy…  

• Another GDPR breach allegation has emerged against ChatGPT

That's all!

We'll see you again on Tuesday. Thoughts, feedback and questions are much appreciated - respond here or shoot us a note at [email protected].

Cheers,

🪄 The AI Exchange Team