The following is an excerpt adapted from AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Artificial intelligence can perform many tasks better than people can, at essentially zero cost. This simple fact is poised to generate tremendous economic value but also to cause unprecedented job displacement -- a wave of disruption that will hit blue- and white-collar workers alike. In the future, AI will be doing everything from underwriting our loans to building our homes, and even hiring and firing us.

As the coronavirus pandemic enveloped the world last year, businesses increasingly turned to automation in order to address rapidly changing conditions. Floor-cleaning and microbe-zapping disinfecting robots were introduced in hospitals, supermarkets and other environments. Some enterprises found that, given the new emphasis on hygiene and social distancing, robotic operations offered a marketing advantage. The American fast food chain White Castle began using hamburger-cooking robots in an effort to create "an avenue for reduced human contact with food during the cooking process". With the worst days of the pandemic hopefully now behind us, the jobs story has turned out to be unexpectedly complicated. While overall unemployment rates remain elevated, both the US and the UK are experiencing widespread worker shortages, focused especially in those occupations that tend to offer gruelling work conditions and relatively low pay.

He works with our accounts, makes monthly closing, collects information from our invoicing system, ERP and online payments and enters them to the accounting system. "I just hired a guy--his name is Mark II--to process insurance claims. He can also analyze the claims and make decisions. Both of them are obviously effective guys, but there is even something better. He doesn't just handle the routines and processes we had earlier, but we can redesign all our operations not only to save costs but multiply our sales.

Software developers make up the largest STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) occupation. Will automation impact it like everything else? New research puts a microscope on STEM jobs and their impact on automation. As I have stated many times before, STEM education directly impacts the technology sector because this is where we are training our next generation (or not), giving them the required education to drive innovation. Whether you believe it or not, young people exposed to STEM education often determines whether young people will be exposed to jobs in STEM-related fields.

Will AI render managers obsolete by 2024? Perhaps not entirely, but a new report from Gartner predicts that with innovation and the responsible adoption of AI tech, the tedium of managers' paper flow will be greatly reduced by an estimated 69%. "The role of manager will see a complete overhaul in the next four years," said Helen Poitevin, research vice president at Gartner, in a release. "Currently, managers spend time filling in forms, updating information and approving workflows. By using AI to automate these tasks, they can spend less time managing transactions and can invest more time on learning, performance management and goal setting." SEE: Prescriptive analytics: An insider's guide (free PDF) AI will influence the office, but the level at which it does, will be based on new tech advances, organizational readiness to exploit, and worker attitudes, the report, "Predicts 2020: AI and the Future of Work," found.

Gartner says artificial intelligence is expected to be common in the office by 2025, already seeing'huge pent-up demand' Artificial intelligence (AI) will be widely adopted in office environments in a variety of ways over the next few years as businesses invest in digital workplace initiatives, Gartner analysts have said. The trend is expected to gather steam as voice-activated personal assistants that have proved a hit at home begin to make inroads in the office. By 2025, the technology will "certainly be mainstream," said Matthew Cain, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner – even though privacy and security concerns have limited deployments so far. Cain was among the analysts who spoke at Gartner's Digital Workplace Summit in London. Gartner has separately predicted that consumer and business spending on smart speakers will pass $3.5 billion (€3.15 billion) in 2021, with 25% of digital workers using an AI assistant on a daily basis within the next two years.

Smart assistants could become common AI presences in the office. Artificial intelligence (AI) will become "mainstream" enterprise technology by 2025, according to Gartner analysts at its Digital Workplace Summit in London. As reported by ComputerWorld, AI programs will become commonplace in our offices, as investments in digital transformation continue, and applications of the technology continue to permeate business operations. In particular, digital voice assistants which have been well-received among consumers could serve as'receptionists' in the office environment, booking meeting rooms, or on-boarding new recruits, for example. In fact, Gartner expects 25 percent of digital workers to be using AI voice assistants within the next two years, and reportedly urged businesses to begin developing skills in their deployment, management, and security.

LONDON – Artificial intelligence (AI) will be widely adopted in office environments in a variety of ways over the next few years as businesses invest in digital workplace initiatives, Gartner analysts said today. The trend is expected to gather steam as voice-activated personal assistants that have proved a hit at home begin to make inroads in the office. By 2025, the technology will "certainly be mainstream," said Matthew Cain, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner – even though privacy and security concerns have limited deployments so far. Cain was among the analysts who spoke at Gartner's Digital Workplace Summit here. Gartner has separately predicted that consumer and business spending on smart speakers will pass $3.5 billion in 2021, with 25% of digital workers using an AI assistant on a daily basis within the next two years.

Impressive advances in artificial intelligence technology tailored for legal work have led some lawyers to worry that their profession may be Silicon Valley's next victim. But recent research and even the people working on the software meant to automate legal work say the adoption of A.I. in law firms will be a slow, task-by-task process. In other words, like it or not, a robot is not about to replace your lawyer. "There is this popular view that if you can automate one piece of the work, the rest of the job is toast," said Frank Levy, a labor economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. An artificial intelligence technique called natural language processing has proved useful in scanning and predicting what documents will be relevant to a case, for example.

Advancements in AI, Big Data, the Internet of Things and automation have many industries worried that these systems will push them out, absorb their work, make humans redundant, or accelerate the speed of business too fast for them to adapt. From formal models of legal reasoning to automated information extraction from legal databases and texts, the interaction of artificial intelligence and law will disrupt the contemporary status of legal practice. With the latest'wonder automation' in the form of JP Morgan's COIN, building upon the adoption of AI systems by firms such as Clifford Chance, and development projects like Denton's NextLaw Labs leading the way, are lawyers set to be replaced? AI will spell the end of lawyers. However, the age of automation and digitisation gives birth to an even more beautiful legal specialist: the cyber-lawyer – an augmented specialist, combining the processing power of AI with powerful searches of legal indexes in mere seconds through Big Data, produced through a human interface.