Nela Richardson has a rare window into how AI is changing work. Her 3 takeaways should make you excited—or very frightened
Nela Richardson, ADP's chief economist, is leading a project to analyze the labor market by focusing on individual tasks rather than traditional job titles. This "great job unbundling" uses natural language processing on millions of job postings and cross-references them with payroll data to identify which specific activities are increasing in value due to AI and which are being devalued. Richardson's initial findings suggest that white-collar work, as it has existed since the latter half of the 20th century, is structurally unwinding, a trend she attributes more to the evolution of technology than solely to AI. AI
IMPACT AI is poised to redefine white-collar jobs by breaking them down into discrete tasks, potentially shifting value and altering traditional career paths.