#44 - Alexandra Levit - Humanity Works: Merging technologies and people for the workforce of the future

This podcast interview focuses on the future of work and the increasingly important role AI plays in our business life. My guest is Alexandra Levit, Author of the book Humanity Works – Merging technology and people for the workforce of the future.

Alexandra is an American writer, consultant, speaker, workplace expert and futurist. She has written six career advice books and was formerly a nationally syndicated career columnist for the Wall Street Journal. In the last several years, she has conducted proprietary research on the future of work, technology adoption, the millennial generation, gender differences and bias, and the skills gap. In 2017, she became a partner at organizational development firm PeopleResults. Her goal is to prepare organizations and their employees to be competitive and marketable in the future business world.

This triggered me, hence I invited Alexandra to my podcast. We explore how the workplace is changing with the future of work, and how this is reshaping our role as business professionals, and what we, as people, need to do now in order to create a future in which we can play an even more valuable role.

Here are some of his quotes:

We're looking at there is the rise of what I call the human machine of hybrid teams.

I do think everyone needs to be prepared, though, that humans will need to work seamlessly with machines.

The critical role that we're going to play is that there's no replacing human beings when it comes to certain traits, like interpersonal sensitivity, empathy and judgment, and intuition and creativity

So what humans need to be doing is looking for ways to add that value in any job that you have, and see the writing on the wall, not bury your head in the sand with respect to what aspects are legitimately going to be automated and look to add value in different ways.

My fear is not that people lose their jobs, as I said, my fear is that people will not be able to adapt to the new types of roles that they're, they're going to have.

How can I continue to add value? And this is a skill set, that's kind of rare, and everybody needs to develop.

I think the passive attitude is really destructive. We want to be active and recognize the future is not something that happens to us. It's something that we create.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

1. That most value will be created once humans and machines start working as hybrid teams
2. Why every single one of us has to act now to improve our human relationship skills
3. And why beyond that we have to master the way we do personal branding and self-marketing.