Future of Work Video Series

About a year ago, we started filming a series that we called the Future of Work. We sought out experts in the field who are looking at the future of how we work from very different angles. This will probably be a long-term project that explores our work, our tools, our workplace and our place in business and tries to imagine what each will be like over the next ten years. We have material to fill several episodes and plan to release them over the next several months.

In the first episode, we explore what our workplace will be like and the role that technology will play. For this episode, we talk to Tim Tuttle, CEO and Founder of Expect Labs, Matt Mills of Featurespace and previously of Aurasma, and John Mancini, President of AIIM.

We chose Tim because of his background in Artificial Intelligence (AI) at MIT and his application of AI technology in the workplace with Expect Labs. We discovered Matt when we were exploring Augmented Reality. H, he is now at Featurespace, which is applying research on behavioral analytics in the workplace. Both subject areas are fascinating. I have been involved with AIIM for several years now and it is always worth talking to John Mancini about how content and process technology will affect our workplace and how we do work.

From my personal perspective, I am hoping and expecting that technology is going to make work easier and more natural. Being an early adopter of technology over the last three decades, I can't say that technology has always made life easier or more focused. Adopting the latest technology, although almost always fun, comes with the cost of adoption, a learning curve and a natural distraction.

My early adoption of blogging, Facebook, Twitter and Quora have always come at the expense of getting stuff done at work. I may be in the know, but it's not necessarily helping me get my job done. What I hope and I expect is that as it develops, technology will become less distracting, more focused, more natural and simpler than preceding versions.

The technologies that Tim, Matt and John discuss may well be the solution to these problems of lack of simplicity and focus. For example, rooms that comprehend who has entered and can listen to and understand conversations will be able to provide a context to capturing and delivering information. Ubiquitous technology that includes being surrounded by touchscreen devices will make that information available wherever and whenever we need it. Artificial intelligence that is statistically driven will be able to understand what we can and cannot do and automatically provide support when we need it. Not just one, but multiple intelligent assistants will be built into all the applications we use and will be expert at how those applications work and the support you as the user need. These are pretty fantastic things to consider.

In future episodes, we will be exploring how we collaborate, what the new tools of the office will be and how our businesses will be fundamentally changed by the future of our work. It won't be surprising that we will be focusing on information, types of activity, work process and the nature of work itself rather than the latest shiny devices. These are my interests and it is difficult to purely extrapolate technology to see where we are going. It takes a range of skills and insights to try to determine where we are going rather than just trying to figure out what the next five versions of an iPhone will be like. Therefore, we will be talking with people like Geoffrey Moore of Crossing the Chasm fame, Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, and many other experts on the future of work to see how technology will be applied rather than just how it will evolve.

Take a look and see what you think. Join the conversation on how these and other technologies will affect the way we work and the very nature of the work we do.