Future of work & productivity

1. AI will do it for you

   The biggest debate in productivity circles: how far can generative AI take us? Large language models like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, plus the hundreds of apps being built on top of them, are infiltrating the workplace to tackle tasks like writing call scripts and breaking down complex legal questions.

   London-based Metaview’s technology, for example, transcribes interviews so well that the startup claims it will leave recruiters with three to five minutes of text cleaning to do post-interview versus the usual half an hour.

   There are early movers betting on GenAI: giants like Morgan Stanley and IBM are planning to invest in chatbots to complement analyst’s work. The majority of business leaders will be cautious, however, knowing that AI perpetuates biases and makes mistakes (and therefore still requires rigorous testing).

2. Can GenAI unlock deep work?

   “Deep work” — the ability popularised by productivity evangelist and professor Cal Newport — involves concentrating on a single problem or project for an extended period without distractions.

   If GenAI someday takes on our admin chores — answering emails and drafting our Slack messages — we may be able to aspire to more deep work, and the privilege of being able to do it can extend beyond the knowledge sector to jobs that involve juggling multiple, complex responsibilities.

3. Dodging the ‘toggle tax’

   We constantly flick between different apps and websites hundreds of times each day. This “toggling tax” — better known among psychologists as “context switching” — is making it hard to focus and, over time, stresses us out.

   There’s a strong case for less: a 2023 survey of 9,615 workers by work software Asana found that, among workers who use more than 16 apps, 25% said they miss messages and actions, compared to 8% using one to five apps and 15% using six to fifteen.

   Can tech solve the problem it created? While we’ll never have a single platform to get all our work done on, decreasing toggle drain presents a key selling point for more integrative, all-in-one apps — popular ones include Personio and Asana — to consolidate tasks.

4. Enterprise software meets the scythe

   And speaking of cutting back: the downturn has finance teams running the ruler over their expenses and pruning vendors.

   SaaS’s relentless upward curve is suddenly under threat: according to research from subscription management platform Cledara, companies reduced their spending on software by 2.9% in December 2022, following a trend of a decline in growth of SaaS spending from August onwards.

5. Spyware and ‘so-so automation’ on the rise

   There’s a new cottage industry called “people analytics”, where tech is being deployed to monitor staff. Earlier this year, computer forensics analyst Maciej Broniarz warned EU lawmakers that the market for “highly intrusive spyware is snowballing”. As it’s spread, so has resistance to it.

   Then there’s the workplace tech that’s not so much intrusive as just ineffective. In Power and Progress, a brand-new book by MIT economists Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, the authors coin the term “so-so automation” for a bunch of supposedly productivity-boosting tech — such as call centre bots — which aren’t actually that much more productive than humans, if indeed at all.

Who early stage startups are up against