'The advent of AI is drawing the world's attention to the extreme imbalance of power between employers and their employees.' 'The advent of AI is drawing the world's attention to the extreme imbalance of power between employers and their employees.' New technology has workers spooked, but experts say it's creating an opening for a resurgence in worker power In 2026, it's a scary time to work for a living. Gone are the days of quiet quitting, the Great Resignation, and the highly visible union-organizing battles that began the decade and signaled that perhaps worker power was on the rise again in the US. Instead, much of that momentum is being crowded out of our minds by anxieties: a worsening affordability crisis, geopolitical instability, and the specter of artificial intelligence looming over the workplace.

But since then, labor participation has declined sharply, with around 3.4 million fewer workers participating in the job market than immediately before the pandemic, according to the chamber. Companies of all shapes and sizes have struggled to cope with the mounting labor shortage, and have seemingly tried everything to remedy it, from reducing operating hours to offering employees previously unheard-of perks. Now new data suggests that American companies are leaning more on something else to combat the lack of human workers: robots. For the third consecutive quarter, U.S. robotics sales numbers have hit a record high, according to figures out this week by the Association for Advancing Automation, a trade group also known as A3. The U.S. robotics industry sold 12,305 units last quarter, a 25% bump from the same period in 2021 and 6% higher than in the first quarter of this year.

Many of today's business challenges revolve around two core topics: navigating digital transformation and retaining talent. The latest insights from MIT Sloan Management Review focus on looking past common misconceptions about digital initiatives, setting the right KPIs for digital transformation success, and changing corporate culture and business operations so employees are more likely to stay. Just as today's business leaders should rethink common assumptions about the world of work and re-examine customer expectations, they may also need a new mindset about driving change. MIT Sloan senior lecturer George Westerman identifies four managerial assumptions about digital transformation that prevent enterprises from reaching their true potential. This emphasizes digital but not transformation -- the more difficult (and more important) element to address.

The Great Resignation may be a myth or reality, depending upon your viewpoint. But one thing is clear: The labor shortage is real. But it is likely not due to a decline in the participation rate. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the post-pandemic labor force participation rate has not declined dramatically. In fact, the core ages of the workforce, 25-54, saw a dip at the onset of the pandemic that was mild compared to other age groups – especially workers 55 .

One of the more persistent consequences of the COVID crisis has been the so-called "Great Resignation," a development that has been unfolding over most of the past two years. We've seen a steady flow of employees leave the workforce, many doing so after taking stock of their lives amid a rapidly changing world. The insurance industry has by no means been immune to this. Companies in our industry rely heavily on the institutional knowledge of experienced employees, so as the pandemic has served as a catalyst for early retirements, these organizations have been especially hard hit. Employees are an organization's most valuable assets.

The coronavirus crisis had a noticeable domino effect in several areas related to lifestyle, wellbeing, public health, economics, and more. A large-scale change the world witnessed that perhaps was not as anticipated as the others was the Great Resignation. Of course, this is in reference to the substantial number of workers who decided to leave their jobs over the past few years. Many factors have led to the boost in employee departures. As top reasons, a variety of people attribute a reevaluation of their priorities regarding salary, working conditions, and what they want to accomplish in life.

The coaching technology will help managers in other ways. For all that professional sports coaches are used as a metaphor for managers, front-line managers have generally received little training on being good coaches. They lack the data skills, structure, discipline and workflow to be great coaches. There is no school to get a frontline manager MBA. And typically top individual contributors from last year get promoted to be managers this year, which is a completely different job.

While most approaches to cybersecurity remain stuck in the past -- using rules, signatures, and other historically defined understandings of threat -- best practice these days is to keep your focus forward, preparing for the unknown and the unpredictable. In that spirit, Darktrace anticipates what 2022 will bring, both in terms of the threat landscape and for evolutions in defensive technologies. Focusing on augmenting the human with AI is just as important as the cutting-edge mathematics that drive AI. The relationship between humans and AI can be improved with explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). In cybersecurity, this means delivering the insights of AI to the security team on a silver platter -- that is, in human-readable language and clear diagrams rather than abstruse code.

More than 40% of all employees were thinking about leaving their jobs at the beginning of 2021, and as the year went on, workers quit in unprecedented numbers.1 Between April and September 2021, more than 24 million American employees left their jobs, an all-time record.2 As the Great Resignation rolls on, business leaders are struggling to make sense of the factors driving the mass exodus. More importantly, they are looking for ways to hold on to valued employees. To better understand the sources of the Great Resignation and help leaders respond effectively, we analyzed 34 million online employee profiles to identify U.S. workers who left their employer for any reason (including quitting, retiring, or being laid off) between April and September 2021.3 The data, from Revelio Labs, where one of us (Ben) is the CEO, enabled us to estimate company-level attrition rates for the Culture 500, a sample of large, mainly for-profit companies that together employ nearly one-quarter of the private-sector workforce in the United States.4 Monthly research-based updates on what the future of work means for your workplace, teams, and culture. While resignation rates are high on average, they are not uniform across companies.

As we have reached the end of 2021, my inbox has become stuffed with the now customary batch of emails, from tech companies and their PR agencies, sharing management's thoughts on what next year will hold for us, in the world of data, analytics and AI. As ever, the annual exercise of compiling sage predictions about the upcoming year, from executives around the industry, was a big effort. In fact, once all the prediction emails were consolidated, a 50-page document resulted. As with any big data exercise, my goal was to aggregate the data into groupings I could organize it by, both to tame the volume of the data and because the groupings are themselves instructive. Testing at home can provide peace of mind, and it doesn't have to take a long time or be terribly expensive.