‘Work is going to look very different’: The future of AI in the workplace

A recent discussion at Mallesons’ Digital Future Summit 2026 dispelled misconceptions about AI use and explored what the next decade of work might look like.

The session, titled “Smarter machines, wiser leaders: Navigating the next decade of work”, featured Toby Walsh, chief scientist and scientia professor of artificial intelligence at UNSW Sydney, and Cilla Robinson, partner at Mallesons, for an examination of the issues a digital evolution presents to the workplace and how businesses should be harnessing the change.

Asked what workforces may look like with the increasing introduction of AI, Walsh said they will likely appear as foreign as contemporary offices look to workers from 50 years ago.

“I suspect we’re going to see a similarly radical change in how work looks … the thing that’s especially challenging is that it’s going to happen quicker,” he said.

“I think that’s the difference, people talk about this being the next industrial revolution – the industrial revolution took 50 years to happen, but this one is happening pretty much happening overnight.

“We’ve already put the plumbing in, you only have to be told, there’s this tool, there’s this new language model, here’s the API, here’s the URL, and you can start integrating it into your work.

“I don’t think we’ve ever had technologies before where you can put them into the hands of a billion people literally overnight.”

While Walsh accepted that employees can also be uneasy around semi-sentient technology or its increasing capabilities, he explained that the human trait of projecting ourselves onto the machines, or considering its intelligence the same as humans’, is not proof of a digital sentience.

He said: “We call it artificial intelligence for a good reason, because it is artificial, it is different to human intelligence. It had different strengths and different weaknesses … it’s very complementary.”

In reference to the opposite consideration, whereby workers expressed concern that AI could make potentially catastrophic mistakes that impact an organisation, Walsh said cases where AI seemingly went rogue were due to imprecise instructions that gave room for the technology to “do what it was asked to do”.

“The more explicit, the more detailed the prompt you give it, the better the response you get,” Walsh said.

Robinson said: “We need to start thinking laterally about those different options that may be available to it in the lessons that we’re learning.”

Walsh noted that the ease of scaling AI presents a challenge and almost incompatibility for organisations in that people require time to adjust, but the rapid change in the technology itself continues to occur in real time, making it difficult to catch up – let alone stay ahead of the curve.

He noted that it is likely machines will soon possess cognitive abilities to rival those of humans, and in this way, the features that make people human – creativity, judgement, empathy, and adaptability – will be increasingly harnessed as repetitive, or administrative tasks can be deleted to technology.

Looking back at the beginning of the human species, Walsh said: “Our superpower was our society, our ability to come together, work together in organisations.”

“Those things are actually our superpower, and those are things that are going to become ever more valued, ever more important in the workplace.”

Further, Walsh explained that some concerns about job loss and skill devaluation can fall under the category of “AI-washing”, in which the technology’s capabilities and likely impact are overstated. Some of the headline redundancies, he said, may not be due to AI itself but overhiring or poor management.

However, he accepted that “some of that is happening, but equally, there is some genuine savings being made and potential savings that are going to appear that are going to result in some restructuring … if AI’s doing some work, then maybe there’s less work for humans.”

“It’s hard to know what the net impact is going to be.

“It is disruptive … but the people with greater expertise are probably in greater demand now,” he said.

In this way, he noted that some changes will not necessarily cause job loss but force a lateral move to positions that are growing in demand and need.

Walsh urged management to be aware that AI restructuring will not immediately feel the void of redundancies, and that it will often require human judgement and oversight to see the transition take effect.

“If you look at the tech industry … they’re adopting the tools much more quickly, and other businesses are going to be slower to come along to adopt the technology; institutions perhaps change slower than the technology does, and that’s the hard thing, getting people to change, redesigning, rearchitecting the system,” he said.

Walsh reflected on the significant upheaval and sweeping changes the Industrial Revolution brought, whereby it was not simply a case of replacing a steam engine with an electric one, but re-engineering and redesigning everything from scratch.

AI, he said, will see a similarly necessary change.

“If you just replace this one part of the business process with AI, you speed that up but you just run into a bottleneck everywhere else. You’ve got to say, maybe we need to architect that from the ground up, and that of course is difficult,” he said.

“It’s worth learning the lesson from history.”

“We did a lot of things in the Industrial Revolution to support those changes, to share the benefits, to make sure it wasn’t just the owners of the factories that got the benefits … I think we have to think equally radically in terms of supporting people through the changes.”

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