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VC Investors betting on ‘Future of Work’ and AI technology

I often wonder how work will look like in the future. What we now try to imagine, may be quite right or it will look completely different than our wishful guessing. Certain is, however, that the work definition and current perception of the work day has already been dramatically changing. Science and scope of innovations are still to be discovered and can surprise us every now and then with solutions we were not even close to think of. There are a lot of things we do not know yet about:

process of automation. Existing physical, basic, repetitive tasks are getting replaced with robotics. What’s the scope of the professions that can be disruptive here? The fact that Amazon uses robots in their warehouses does not surprise anyone, anymore. Many more companies, like DHL, CIG, Uber, Tesla, Capita, BestBuy, Target, Macy’s, Adidas, Walmart, Carrier, Nestle, SNCF, Ocado, JustEat, Marriott Hotels, ING, Nissan, Zara, Fidelity Investment, followed, freed up human potential and use it more efficiently letting machines do the ‘heavy’ job.

efficiency at work. Softwares, AI, ML based tools gather data, analyse them, draw conclusions and help advisors make recommendations they would not be able to come up with otherwise. Recently met JetPack Data makes the data analysis quickest I’ve ever seen and transforms different kinds of data into meaningful insights. Planning, organising, scheduling can already be easily automated. Meeting memos are already recorded and written down by machines. Additionally, it’s able to recognize and engage team members that haven’t shared their thoughts during the gathering. It makes the work more efficient, digitized, ensures full participation and prevent from groupthink in the working environment.
No coding skills are needed for basic applications as there are more and more independent tools building websites. Many different automations on global markets have come into play.
distributed work model. We no longer need to go to the office but we can easily work from different parts of the world, totally remotely. It is possible thanks to great quality of video conferencing like Zoom, team collaboration tools like Airtable, Asana, Superhuman and before all other, thanks to mature and reliable employees who value flexibility and trust given them, more and more generously, by employers. It allows exploring different markets, lets companies go global and have presence in different countries not losing, as a trade off, contact with co-workers and culture identity, that would happen otherwise, having distributed teams. Efficiency is less and less correlated with the time you spend on the project. Companies introduce 4 day working week or less than 8h work day and never look back. They watch surprisingly better results when people can balance work and life reasonably.
More and more accessible coworking spaces and home sharing solutions increase mobility and impede collaboration. Ideas sharing, mentoring, dynamic thinking, creative working is easily happening in diverse environment where different professions, skills and experience levels are naturally mixed up.
hiring and talent retention. In order to have this level of independence, HR services, learning , training, education need to be radically changed. The way we hire, the criteria we consider while screening CV are changing and allowing to focus on more human features rather than grades, name of the university, gender, nationality or years of experience. Also, keeping best people is a challenge on the global, more and more competitive market so making sure employees are heard and considered is crucial. Making them feel engaged, respected and impactful can help decrease turnover rate and allow better use of the available resources.

Having experience in structured, banking, consulting, closed office environment, running my own company, working full and part time, having a boss in a steep hierarchy model and working in flat structure organisation where I had no one to monitor my work, I tested quite a few different culture, countries, diverse organization management styles and watching the evolution of this particular piece of our life became my great passion 🙂

Luckily, more and more investors believe that people will work focusing on non-repetitive, random, complex tasks only. They will train the machines, overseeing the production lines, defining strategies, making deals, negotiating, creating innovative solutions and implementing all these to make the work less of a job than we see it nowadays. Machines will not become the substitute to the human work force, they will be the complementary factor so they could all work hand by hand. Redefining the way we live and work has become one of the biggest challenge for the startup founders around the world so we want to help them and speed up the process as much as we can with the money we have in hand.

VC funds that bet on the startups focused on the AI and Future of Work

Trinity Ventures, Menlo Park, CA

Better Ventures, Oakland, CA

Open View, Boston, MA

Glasswing Ventures, Boston, MA

Work-Bench, New York, New York

Bloomberg Beta, San Francisco, CA

Basis Set Ventures, San Francisco, CA

Scale Venture Partners, Foster City, CA

Highland Capital Partners , Cambridge, Massachusetts

Accelerace and Future of Work Accelerator, Copenhagen, Denmark

Google Ventures, San Francisco, CA