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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
AI is disrupting companies, governments and non-profit organisations alike. Entire employment sectors are changing; and, within them, individual roles are shifting, too — with a growing emphasis on skills rather than jobs.
But, while robotics and automation, in past decades, mainly affected “blue collar” manufacturing jobs, AI is now shaking up more highly skilled white-collar roles. For example, it is altering the functions of — and the opportunities in — professions such as law and accountancy.
Like previous technologies, AI is creating new roles, as well, and revamping old ones: the roles of coders and “prompt engineers” are growing even as many more basic administrative tasks fade. Large language models and big data offer prospects to identify trends that humans can then interpret.
This series of FT articles highlights evolutions in the workplace. Precise predictions are difficult to make, but what is clear is that the future workforce will need to prepare for more frequent change and the need to reskill and retrain in response: