The future of work is changing fast. Future Focus cuts through the noise with three trends each week that matter most to HR and business leaders. When everything else is in flux, stay focused with Future Focus.
Want to Build Your Own Chatbot for $100? AI’s DIY Future Is Here (Fortune)
What to Know: A wave of small, low-cost artificial intelligence models — exemplified by Andrej Karpathy’s “nanochat” — shows that capable chatbots can now be trained and deployed on consumer-grade hardware. From Samsung’s Tiny Recursive Model to releases from AI21 Labs and MBZUAI, these models perform strongly on focused tasks while keeping costs low.
Where to Focus: AI economics are shifting from large, monolithic systems to affordable, specialized tools. This trend lowers experimentation costs and gives smaller organizations a realistic entry point for AI adoption. HR and business leaders can empower teams to prototype faster, manage data locally, and align AI investments with practical use cases to avoid paying for broad capabilities they won’t use.
Carmakers Push to Secure Chips as China Trade Spat Escalates (Bloomberg)
What to Know: Due to pandemic-era shortages revealing deep vulnerabilities in semiconductor supply chains, carmakers are racing to secure these critical components as U.S.-China tensions escalate. Automakers are signing long-term contracts and pursuing domestic chip partnerships to reduce their dependency on overseas manufacturing.
Where to Focus: Supply-chain concentration in critical components, such as semiconductors, now poses risks akin to cyber or geopolitical threats. HR and operations leaders should prepare for talent shifts tied to localization efforts — particularly in advanced manufacturing, logistics, and engineering — and build agility into workforce planning as global trade dynamics evolve.
Related Article: Workforce Planning Made Easy — Build, Borrow, or Buy Talent
The World’s First Climate Tipping Point Has Been Crossed, Scientists Say (Time)
What to Know: A global analysis finds that warm-water coral reefs have crossed a climate tipping point. The analysis flags growing risks across other Earth systems, including the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation ocean current system. The findings raise the alarm over accelerating impacts on global food, water, and weather stability.
Where to Focus: For HR and business leaders, this means revisiting workforce planning to protect sites, supply chains, and employees from nonlinear climate shocks. Sustainability roles will become increasingly critical as organizations face mounting investor and regulatory pressure to adapt to rapid environmental change.
Be the first to know what’s next.
Get Future Focus delivered weekly through the Tomorrowist newsletter — your shortcut to smarter decisions in a changing world of work.
An organization run by AI is not a futuristic concept. Such technology is already a part of many workplaces and will continue to shape the labor market and HR. Here's how employers and employees can successfully manage generative AI and other AI-powered systems.
Related Content
Learn how Marsh McLennan successfully boosts staff well-being with digital tools, improving productivity and work satisfaction for more than 20,000 employees.
The proliferation of artificial intelligence in the workplace, and the ensuing expected increase in productivity and efficiency, could help usher in the four-day workweek, some experts predict.
As artificial intelligence technology continues to develop, the demand for workers with the ability to work alongside and manage AI systems will increase. This means that workers who are not able to adapt and learn these new skills will be left behind in the job market.