The Industries of the Future

by Alec J. Ross

If a major lesson learned from Jared and Sheel is that multicultural fluency is increasingly important in a business world that is growing more global, other thinkers and experts I spoke to emphasized a different set of skills—or said that foreign language skills were only part of the equation.

“learning how to think.”

Tomorrow’s labor market will be increasingly characterized by competition between humans and robots.

In tomorrow’s workplace, either the human is telling the robot what to do or the robot is telling the human what to do.

The growing economic diversity and increasing pace of change means that investors and people in global business will have to be as mobile and able to work across cultures as people newly entering the workforce.

The innovation and company creation that is just now beginning to take place in robotics, genomics, cyber, big data, and new fields made possible by the code-ification of money, markets, and trust will spring from alpha cities around the world, but they will also come from places that most business leaders have never visited, like Estonia.