Robots will replace half of today’s occupations by 2025

Advances in artificial intelligence (also known as robots) taking over the workplace will make 50 percent of occupations redundant by 2025, according to a new report by the real estate consulting firm CBRE.

The CBRE report, titled “Fast Forward 2030: The Future of Work and the Workplace,” quotes a 2013 Oxford Martin School study that predicted that nearly half of American jobs are vulnerable to computerization by 2025.

“Customer work, process work and vast swatches of middle management will simply 'disappear,' according to a new report by consulting firm CBRE and China-based Genesis,” stated The Daily Mail.

But CBRE is also quick to point out that “losing occupations does not necessarily mean losing jobs — just changing what people do.”

There will also be a revolution in the traditional workplace, the report says: The rows of desk and mazes of cubicles we have today will be mostly gone by 2030. “Not because they are not fit for purpose, but simply because that purpose will no longer exist,” reported Human Resources Online.

The future workplace will be designed around activity-based working. “This was defined by a variety of quiet retreats as well as collaborative settings, best suited for work at that particular moment — in other words, ‘places to work,’ not ‘workplaces,’ ” continued Human Resources Online.

Citing the Oxford study, the New Zealand Herald lists 20 jobs at highest risk of being replaced by robots. Here is the top five: telemarketers, title examiners, sewage workers, mathematical technicians and insurance writers.

In order to prepare for the occupational shift, employees need to be creatively and socially intelligent, CBRE stated.

Companies should start making changes now to prepare for the future. “ ‘The dramatic changes in how people work that we have seen in the past two decades will continue to evolve over the next 15 years, opening up new opportunities for companies to create value and enhance employee performance through innovative workplace strategies and designs,’ CBRE South Asia Chairman and Managing Director Anshuman Magazine said,” the Business Standard reported.

Smart companies can gain a competitive advantage by designing “high performance workplaces” that “are deliberately conceived to align with business objectives (and) work practices,” said the report.

“For many of us, artificial intelligence will be a tool to undertake tasks of a scale and complexity that were once unimaginable but which are now eminently possible and hugely rewarding,” stated the CBRE report.

dsutton@deseretnews.com | Twitter: @debylene