Deloitte’s top futurist explains why companies should embrace ‘serial specialists’

Does your workplace belong in the metaverse? Should AI be allowed to run with agency and scale? How hard should bosses fight hard to retain “10x engineers”? Management consultancy Deloitte addresses these questions in its 14th annual “Tech Trends” report, released today, which aims to identify advancements expected to be “consequential to business transformation over the next 18 to 24 months.”

Fast Company spoke to Deloitte’s Chief Futurist, Mike Bechtel for the top takeaways.

The metaverse isn’t just a new toy

Despite the hype and controversy over the so-called metaverse, “what we’re actually seeing is that for enterprises, the adoption of virtual reality, augmented reality—and in some cases, virtual worlds—is just the next evolution in interaction simplicity,” Bechtel says. The metaverse isn’t just about Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of legless avatars in a virtual conference room; immersive technologies can aid businesses in things like prototyping, experimentation, and training as well.

Bechtel pointed to the example of power provider Exelon, which has been using virtual reality to train staff to work on electrical substations. “With a VR training solution, what they’re suddenly able to do is say, ‘Okay, see, you went too close to that piece while holding the hammer, which is why you got shocked,’” he says. And while metaverse-style technology may not be a “shiny new source of revenue for all” yet, “these quieter back office stories are already very much showing returns.”

Trust your new robot colleagues

Enterprise adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning technology is rapidly accelerating. The question is no longer whether businesses are going to use AI/ML for mission critical processes, or even which vendor to use, Bechtel says, but whether the technology is allowed to run “with agency and at scale.”

According to the Tech Trends report, American Airlines recently used an AI model to reduce a four-hour gate assignment process, which had required a team to work late into the night, to a two-and-a-half minute procedure. The key to the model’s success: It was cocreated with the gate planners, who are “thrilled because they’ve been redeployed to work during the day” on higher-level tasks, Bechtel says.

To get along with their new “inorganic colleagues,” enterprise firms are moving toward “transparent and explainable AI models, whose decisions can be understood, and whose work can be audited, governed, questioned, and approved,” Bechtel says. That’ll be especially important in case of another black swan event like the pandemic, which infamously upended big data models across the world.

Hire ‘serial specialists’

Forget the false dichotomy between specialists and generalists, or finding the vaunted “10x engineers.” Instead, embrace “10-job engineers,” or “serial specialists,” suggests the Tech Trends report.

Those are terms Deloitte’s team coined after surveying hundreds of organizations on their talent practices. Betchel says their research found the most successful firms “recognize that the tendency for people of all ages to work on something for three years, and then raise their hand and say, ‘I’m bored, I want to change,’ should be seen as a feature, not a bug.” That means cultivating internal career paths that allow employees to progress laterally between different skills and technologies.

This isn’t just something happening at small startups, but also at large, unionized companies like Mercedes-Benz, where new contracts state that workers are expected to become “adept at new things every three to five years,” Bechtel says. “That way, change is baked in. You get deep, then you go up, and then you get deep in something new.”

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