Shaping the Workforce of Tomorrow

“What’s new and exciting?” I asked my boss nearly every day when I showed up for work.

It was my freshman year of college, and I had landed my first office job at a class-action law firm in the Murray Hill neighborhood of New York City.

Working there felt special to me. Both of my grandfathers were lawyers, and being at a law firm created a connection to them that I hadn’t felt in years.

Except for one tiny detail: the work itself.

My job was to help a bookkeeper digitize the firm’s client time-tracking system by manually transferring hours from paper ledgers to Excel spreadsheets.

To say the work was dull would be an understatement, but it was the beginning of my choosing employment stability over the type of work that would make me excited to get out of bed in the morning.

By year's end, I declared Accounting as my major. Safe. Dependable. The epitome of job security.

By my senior year, I had passed the CPA exam and launched my “exciting” career in Accounting and Finance. What followed was a whirlwind tour through corporate America:

• Arthur Andersen (my front-row seat to the Enron debacle)

• Simon & Schuster (I genuinely loved working in publishing)

• UBS (a crazy place to be during the 2008 financial crisis)

• A&P (the supermarket chain that went bankrupt after 150 years)

• ERA (I bought a franchise. This was my first real attempt at entrepreneurship.) 

• AP (apparently, I have a thing for acronyms)

By then, I thought I was done with accounting and finance. My decision to prioritize job stability had worked. I never had trouble finding a new job, even during the 2008 financial crisis, when I managed to land a better position with a higher title, more money, and closer to home.

But all of that came at a cost.

People talk about burnout a lot today, and maybe that’s what I was experiencing, but it felt deeper than that. I didn’t enjoy my work. It was mundane, repetitive, and utterly draining.

Most days, I’d think, “This work should be done by a robot.”

Of course, it was still too early for automation to take over, and the belief that “work is called work for a reason” was deeply ingrained in me. The idea that I should enjoy my job felt like a luxury, if not a fantasy, so I buried that thought for years.

Until I couldn’t anymore.

One day, I had this overwhelming sense that something terrible would happen to me if I stayed at my job any longer.

It wasn’t just burnout. I felt like I was losing touch with myself as if my work was stripping away who I was.

I did give my profession one last shot when I was offered the role of CFO at a tech startup. But not long after, I realized it was a wrong path for me. I needed something different.

Through it all, I couldn't shake the feeling that the real issue was the system. The entire structure felt outdated, inefficient, and, in many ways, inhumane. 

I started researching and seeking alternatives. I published articles on meaningful work and co-authored best-selling books.

Then, the AI revolution hit, and suddenly, everything clicked. This was the solution I'd been seeking all along. AI has the potential to free us from the monotonous work that made me so miserable and allow humans to focus on what makes us truly human.

I'm not blind to AI's potential risks, especially in the wrong hands. But that doesn’t diminish the incredible possibilities it opens up for the future of work. It’s a future unlike anything we’ve seen before.

Today, I’m focused on shaping the workforce of tomorrow by developing and exploring strategies for the future of work.

And now, I no longer have to ask anyone, “What’s new and exciting?” because everything I work on fills me with wonder and curiosity.

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