Isabelle Chappuis is an economist and director of the Swiss Center for Positive Futures at the Faculty of HEC of the UNIL. She recently published a book on the future of work, starting with HR. She tells us about it.

You have just written a book about the work of the future. Can you tell me which job will disappear?

I am a futurist, but I do not make predictions. I highlight all the futures and dilemmas ahead, so that we can make better informed choices. But don't ask me if plumbers or cashiers will disappear. There are algorithms that make these kinds of predictions, but it's very tricky, because the future is not a linear projection of the present, let alone the past. Having said that, we must still ask ourselves questions, for example about the future of jobs in sales, because this sector is largely disruptedtnot only by the health crisis, but also by digitalisation and changing behaviour. Yet the sales sector is chosen by 24% of young people in apprenticeships today, and these are people who'We are sending them to the box "stress".

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Labour shortages are becoming widespread, including with the massive development of robots.

The developed economies, driven by innovation, are changing so dramatically that there will soon be a shortage of hands and brains everywhere. The new German government under Olaf Scholz has taken the measure of the changes. Europe's largest economy has decided to anticipate a crisis that will soon become a reality.'s largest economy has decided to anticipate a crisis that is worsening with the ageing of the population. The country has announced that it wants to attract 400'000 net newcomers per year, i.e. four times its current balance. In the process, the country will facilitate naturalisation and open its borders even wider to highly qualified people from all over the world. A first in Europe.

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The digital workforce is a phrase that has recently been coined to describe a variety of robotic and automated solutions for driving productivity efficiencies in the workplace. Some of these technologies are in their early stages of development, while others are coming to maturity and undergoing mass adoption by businesses.

In most cases, the digital workforce will not be a physical embodiment of a digital worker. Rather a virtual robot (software) that will be either working in the background or accessed by consumers and co-workers through a command based interface.

For businesses, the introduction of Robotics Process Automation (RPA) has allowed substantial reductions in headcount in traditionally highly manual and cost-intensive processes. WorkFusion, an intelligent automation platform, allows clients to have automation rates of up to 60% on some teams, freeing up resources to focus on value-add activities.

For customers, they may be exposed to robots via a chat function on instant messaging (IM) or through a website, however conversational automation (known as natural language processing) is currently undergoing significant development. WeChat is a leading example of successful deployment of chat bots, with a broad range of organisations using this digital capability to reach consumers.

Today's fast-moving digital economy will reward the early movers that have already begun their automation journey with brisk movement up the learning curve. As workers learn to interact with robots - a
relationship that will become mutually beneficial if developed effectively - we will see greater stability and definition of internal governance in the new digital workforce.

The introduction of the digital workforce for most workplaces is likely to occur in a series of evolutions. These evolutions can be broken down into the following categories, differentiated by the
computing complexity of the solution :

• Evolution 1 - Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
• Evolution 2 - Cognitive computing
• Evolution 3 - Artificial intelligence