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66 million years ago an asteroid collided with the Earth triggering an environmental holocaust that killed the dinosaurs roaming our planet. From a human perspective this extinction event turned out to be fortuitous, since the remains of these creatures were transformed into the oil and gas resources that underpin our modern way of life.
66 million years later human knowledge work is facing a similar extinction event. It’s become quite clear that Generative AI technology will eliminate many of the activities commonly performed by today’s knowledge workers. However, it’s difficult to forecast whether the human consequences of this event will ultimately be favorable as well.
What Is Knowledge Work In Principle?
Knowledge work is actually an imprecise term, especially in today’s world where almost every professional pursuit has been “digitally transformed.” It’s historically been used to describe any form of non-manual labor. But in reality many jobs involve a mixture of manual and non-manual tasks. Home builders, Japanese gardeners and pastry chefs all employ specialized knowledge, skills and personal experiences in performing their manual crafts but they are rarely considered to be knowledge workers.
As a practical matter, we’ve come to define knowledge work on the basis of an individual’s training, workplace behavior and employment status. Individuals working in jobs requiring some type of professional college degree – such as medicine, engineering or business administration – are considered to be knowledge workers. Individuals who spend the majority of their time sitting in front of computer screens, attending meetings and delivering work products in the form of documents, presentations and spreadsheets are considered to be knowledge workers. And finally, individuals who have a large degree of personal freedom in prioritizing tasks and managing their time-on-the-job are considered to be knowledge workers. They are routinely classified as exempt employees and paid on a non-hourly basis.
Prior to Covid it would have been convenient and mostly accurate to describe knowledge work as work performed in office settings. But there are so many hybrid work arrangements in today’s working world that the term “office work” has very little practical meaning.
What Is Knowledge Work In Reality?
Perhaps the most accurate way to define knowledge work is to simply analyze the generic tasks commonly performed by knowledge workers. These tasks generally fall into three broad categories.
Metawork (also known as “work about work”) Metawork is the frequently dreaded but absolutely necessary investment of time in keeping co-workers and managers informed about an individual’s work plans and progress. Metawork manifests itself in the form of meetings, status reports, emails, Slack messages, Zoom calls, etc. As jobs become more highly specialized and organizations become less hierarchical the coordination of activities within and across different teams becomes increasingly important and time consuming.
Enabling Work (also known as “grunt work”) Enabling work consists of the seemingly endless tasks that must be accomplished before real work can be performed or work assignments can be formally completed. Enabling work has very little intrinsic business value but it is an essential precursor or a required postscript to value-generating tasks. For example, casual observers might be surprised to learn that software engineers actually spend very little time actually writing lines of code. They devote considerable time to enabling tasks such as managing development environments, researching APIs, testing code, documenting code, etc. They commonly view these enabling tasks as unavoidable grunt work that must be performed before they can focus on the real work for which they were hired, which is to translate business logic into lines of code.
Real Work (also known as “real work”) Real work is the type of work that most knowledge workers relish. It involves the use of their formal training, practical skills and prior experience to produce some type of tangible artifact that has clear business value. It is typically a creative activity that exercises their talents for critical thinking, analysis and deduction. The artifacts resulting from real work are actionable in a business context. They may consist of plans or proposals or studies that will be used to make significant decisions regarding the future allocation of corporate resources or day-to-day operational practices. In other instances they may be designs, prototypes or products that have commercial value. Most workers derive their greatest sense of personal accomplishment and job satisfaction from real work.
The terms used above are colloquial in nature and don’t have well established business definitions. They are subject to individual interpretation within the context of one’s job. Nevertheless, every knowledge worker has an intuitive understanding of these distinctions. They abhor metawork, are endlessly frustrated by grunt work, and feel that they spend far too little time performing real work that leverages their professional capabilities and results in actionable business outcomes.
How Will Agentic AI Impact These Different Types Of Knowledge Work?
The network of specialized AI agents envisioned as an essential component of every company’s future workforce is likely to have a devastating effect on metawork. This network will maintain up-to-date knowledge of the nature and status of most workplace tasks since they, the agents, will be performing many of them. The instantaneous availability of such information will negate the need for many meetings, calls and messages that take place today.
Human workers will have personal AI agents that will keep them apprised of the plans and progress of their human and non-human counterparts as frequently as they wish. They can communicate personal concerns, questions and encouragement via this multiagent network as well. With practice, personal agents can anticipate a human’s concerns and questions and collect relevant information to address topics of personal interest without prompting.
Metawork requirements will also decline simply because there will be fewer human workers in the agentic workplace of the future.
Perhaps the largest time savings delivered by agentic AI will be a reduction in enabling work. Many enabling tasks are repetitive in nature, follow well known procedural guidelines and require very little creative thinking. Such tasks are perfectly suited for agentic automation in whole or in part.
Real work is likely to be more resistant to the agentic onslaught, particularly those forms of real work that require original thinking, emotional understanding, reasoning by analogy, historical knowledge, information discovery through disparate data analysis, creative problem-solving, etc.
In summary, all forms of knowledge work will be impacted to some degree by the growing presence of agentic AI networks. The extent to which individual human workers will be impacted may vary considerably depending upon the nature of their jobs and their organizational responsibilities.
Survival Guide For The Post AI Armageddon Workplace
The extinction of many forms of knowledge work commonly practiced today will bring those activities that create true business value into sharper focus. Business value creation is primarily, if not exclusively, the result of the real forms of knowledge work described above. Knowledge workers have an instinctive understanding of what constitutes real work because peers who are able to do more or better real work get paid more and have more impressive job titles, even in today’s environment.
In the Darwinian struggle for workplace survival that’s about to ensue as agentic networks multiply, humans need to find ways of devoting more time to refining and performing real knowledge work that exploits their uniquely human mental capabilities, while proactively surrendering metawork and grunt work to their agentic colleagues. To paraphrase a popular saying, “you won’t lose your job to an AI agent, you’ll lose it to someone else who has the most agents working for them!”