No one doubts that our future will feature more automation than our past or present. The question is how we get from here to there, and how we do so in a way that is good for humanity. Sometimes it seems the most direct route is to automate wherever possible, and to keep iterating until we get it right. Here's why that would be a mistake: imperfect automation is not a first step toward perfect automation, anymore than jumping halfway across a canyon is a first step toward jumping the full distance. Recognizing that the rim is out of reach, we may find better alternatives to leaping--for example, building a bridge, hiking the trail, or driving around the perimeter. This is exactly where we are with artificial intelligence. AI is not yet ready to jump the canyon, and it probably won't be in a meaningful sense for most of the next decade. Rather than asking AI to hurl itself over the abyss while hoping for the best, we should instead use AI's extraordinary and improving capabilities to build bridges.

In this short paper, we introduce work that is aiming to purposefully venture into this mesh of questions from a different starting point. Interjecting into the conversation, we want to ask: 'What is it to be skilled at work?' Building on work from scholars like Tim Ingold, and strands of longstanding research in workplace studies and CSCW, our interest is in turning the attention to the active work of 'being good', or 'being skilled', at what we as workers do. As we see it, skill provides a counterpoint to the version of intelligence that appears to be easily blackboxed in systems like Slack, and that ultimately reduces much of what people do to work well together. To put it slightly differently, skill - as we will argue below - gives us a way into thinking about work as a much more entangled endeavour, unfolding through multiple and interweaving sets of practices, places, tools and collaborations. In this vein, designing for the future of work seems to be about much more than where work is done or how we might bolt on discrete containers of intelligence. More fruitful would be attending to how we succeed in threading so many entities together to do our jobs well - in 'coming to be skilled'.

Reco, a company using AI to map a company's data sharing, today announced that it raised $30 million in a Series A round led by Insight Partners, with participation from Zeev Ventures, BoldStart, Angular Ventures, Jibe Ventures, CrewCapital and Cyber Club London. CEO Ofer Klein said the proceeds will to toward product development and supporting the company' go-to-market efforts. Reco is Klein's second venture after Kwik, an internet of things platform for "connected customer experiences." Nakash led research at the Office of the Prime Minister in Israel prior to joining Reco, while Shapira, who also worked at the Office of the Prime Minister, was the head of algorithms at heads-up display startup Guardian Optical Technologies. "The distributed workforce is getting bigger. And each of these introduces new security risk," Klein told TechCrunch in an email interview.

Do you want to know how technology is going to affect business in the upcoming years? Then, here are some details that can help you out! The business cosmos was running on the same path for quite a few decades following the industrial revolution. However, with the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, you can expect everything to change exponentially. Even if we go back around ten years ago, we could see that traditional paperwork was still the norm for every organization.

Deloitte considers the digital workplace to be the "natural evolution" of the workplace, and defines it as "all the technologies people use to get work done in today's workplace". That might be a simple definition, but the digital workplace already exists in most companies. The image below charts the direction of a simple intranet system employed by many companies to a fully digital workspace. Below we're going to discuss some of the must-haves to make your digital workspace even better than it already might be. Before you start thinking about anything to do with your digital workplace, you need to have a vision about exactly what you want to achieve.

The COVID19 outbreak has changed the world faster than anyone could have imagined. Forced isolation has shifted meetings and activities to go on through web collaboration tools. Arguably most importantly, the virus has ground the entire economy to a halt. For some industries (travel, retail, food services, fitness), unemployment is already rampant, and for more remote-friendly industries (tech, media), work may go on, but sales are slowed or frozen, and receivables less likely to convert to revenue than ever. The downsides of the virus are easy to see – but business and public sector leaders are forced to think about the silver lining.

Most knowledge workers in 2020 are familiar with mixed reality tools like Zoom, Teams, and Slack that enable them to meet in virtual locations. By merging real and virtual worlds to produce new environments, employees who relied on in-person office interactions as recently as nine months ago now meet on virtual tropical islands, virtually "stand" in front of presentations beamed around the world, or maintain banter and team spirit with timely GIFs and emojis mixed into their workday messages. But these experiences are just the tip of the iceberg of mixed reality offerings. Augmented reality technologies have become regular features in product offerings, along assembly lines, and even in surgeries. Now, with 42 percent of American full-time employees working from home for the foreseeable future as the pandemic lingers, new forms of mixed reality technologies are creating mainstream virtual substitutes for offices, and redefining the future of work in the process.

An ongoing health crisis and a global recession: even for the most attuned of analysts, the past months have brought in a load of unexpected events that have made the coming years especially difficult to envision. Yet research firm CCS Insights has taken up the challenge and delivered a set of 100 tech predictions for the years 2021 and beyond. The exercise is an annual one for the company, which last year anticipated, among many other things, that the next decade could see the rise of deep fake detection technology, or the adoption of domestic robots in some households. One year later, and many of those predictions have been affected in one way or another by the COVID-19 pandemic. "What we've seen in the last few months has completely transformed a lot of the areas we cover," Angela Ashenden, principal analyst at CCS Insights, told ZDNet.

The Coronavirus outbreak demonstrated how unprepared many businesses are for dramatic changes that impact the company and workers. Chatbots proved one of the digital stars of the outbreak, along with collaboration and meeting tools, helping companies keep their workers and customers up to date as part of continuity efforts. The next big business outage could stem from any number of scenarios; from a major hack wiping out your cloud services (as with the Maersk case, a long but scary read). Whatever goes wrong, the ability to keep your customers informed is a key feature of business continuity plans. Something that every company will be updating as work and some normality is restored after the COVID virus.

It is late April 2020 as I write this column and it will appear in early June, at which time I expect we may only just be emerging from the "shelter at home" restrictions imposed by the governors of most of the States in the Union. I contracted the disease in mid-March and spent about three weeks recovering. While my symptoms were mild, the virus left me low on energy and it took time to get back to normal levels. It could have been much worse, and it is for many people, some of whom do not survive. I had occasion to think and speculate about what our profession has to contribute in the response to this worldwide pandemic.