We asked our WorkingNation Advisory Board to share their thoughts on the most important issues and challenges facing the workforce and the labor market in 2024.
John Hope Bryant is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Operation HOPE, the largest nonprofit provider of financial literacy, financial inclusion, and economic empowerment tools and services in the United States for youth and adults.
Here are his thoughts on The Future of Work 2024.
“In order to make sure that low-skilled and medium-skilled workers and working-class people and working middle-class people and working poor don’t get left behind in the AI revolution, we really have to take, as the theme of our Hope Global Forum this year, a case for optimism.
“You’ve got to see the glass as half full and not half empty. When you’re being run out of town, get in front of the crowd and make it like a parade. So we’ve got to… don’t complain about AI, artificial intelligence. Don’t whine about it. It’s here whether you like it or not. It’s been coming here for several years, as I’ve been noting in my interviews that I’ve been doing.
“If you went to CVS or Walgreens or a grocery store or, in some cases, even a department store, you saw these automated devices in the fast food restaurants taking your order, parts of your order. There are people there, but that was major corporations trying to get you used to the coming AI revolution using automation and a little robotics. And so you’re going to see a speeding up of that.
“We need a massive retraining of the workforce, certainly the bottom half of it, to be able to manage AI machines. We need a massive upgrading of education, which is probably a good thing anyway.
“America needs to be a massively educated economy in the 21st century. We can’t have people running around with high school educations in the largest economy on the planet as a norm and expect that to work. So college has to become the new high school and specialized skills have to become the new college. And when we do that, and we will, and we realize we’re better together, Black and white, rich and poor, women joining men, we’ll realize we’re better together.
“We realize the new colors are actually not black or white, or red or blue, it’s green as in the color of U.S. currency. And that I think will pop GDP. We’ll do this retraining, this reinvestment. We get behind artificial intelligence – make it a force for good in the world, lead the rest of the world. And I think that we’ll grow the economy as a result of that. All boats, ultimately, I believe, will rise.”
