Skills: AI, automation changing the core nature of work, warns McKinsey Internet of Business

The average worker of the future is a socially adept leader, entrepreneur, and life-long learner with transferrable technology skills, who is also happy to work in a team, suggests a new McKinsey report. Chris Middleton looks at whether organisations can really find such people. Reports about the growing IT skills gap in digitally enhanced organisations have been circulating for as long as the internet has existed as a business tool, suggesting that the supposed urgency of fixing the problem has not been an impediment to many successful organisations. However, a new report from management consultancy McKinsey suggests that the rapid introduction of automation and artificial intelligence systems within companies is changing the very nature of work itself, as technologies increasingly augment some human skills, and replace others completely. Over the next decade, this will force companies to reconsider how work is organised internally.