The ManpowerGroup CEO sees the hiring slowdown as mostly due to economic cycles – not technology killing jobs
[SINGAPORE] Seven years ago, when I first spoke with Jonas Prising about the rapid advance of automation and artificial intelligence impacting jobs, the chairman and chief executive of workforce solutions giant ManpowerGroup was confident that human beings would always have work to do.
He was equally certain that work would continue to have meaning.
Hence, concepts like a universal basic income – which has been criticised as paying people for doing little – are not the way to go. If anything, it would be “disastrous”.
But so much has changed in the industrial and office landscape since then.
Dark factories abound in China, operating with a minimal workforce. Agentic AI is a hot topic, while software such as Claude performs tasks as well as or better than humans, disrupting the workplace. Implications extend to the entire edifice of capitalism.
The educated-unemployed are now a political worry for many Asian governments – from China to Indonesia to India.
So, it was reassuring to hear from Prising – 62 years old and a father of three adult children – that he still holds to those views, substantially.
The hiring slowdown, where that exists, he attributes mostly to economic cycles – not technology killing jobs.
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As for the idea that humans in the coming age will have little else to do but stare at the ocean eating grapes – as a participant quipped at an AI conference I attended in San Francisco earlier this year – Prising says work will, if anything, take on even more meaning.
And yet, he acknowledges that things are changing beneath the surface.
Employers are getting to be very specific on the skills they seek in staff.
And yes, there is a slowdown in hiring younger people – those with greater experience are preferred because it is the experienced ones who drive productivity gains.
Take the software services industry.
“Coders are still very high on the list of top 10 roles in demand, and all that’s happened is that they’ve gone from No 2 to No 4 on the list,” says Prising, co-chairman of 2026’s Summer Davos in Dalian, otherwise known as the Annual Meeting of the New Champions.
“So the demand is still very strong but less than it was before. Likewise, contact centre agents are staying longer in positions, so hiring comes down. Other than that, these are either economic cycles or geopolitical events influencing the cycle that’s causing employer hesitation.”
“If you think of the narrative of big changes happening (because of technology), that narrative is not visible in the data.”
And that holds true in much of South-east Asia including Singapore and Vietnam, particularly in the latter, which is enjoying a manufacturing boom, he notes.
As for growth, it is all in categories such as on-demand services – the “Uber-isation of work”, freelancers, independent contractors and outsourcing.
“Companies have a plethora of choices on how to execute strategy. So you are seeing this evolution of a permanent workforce being augmented by other pieces – today, most of the growth (in jobs) sits in the augmentation of other forms of employment. That makes companies get very sophisticated when they hire.”
What about China, where, according to some estimates, youth unemployment could be as high as 46 per cent?
Fully automated plants may capture the headlines, but the broader story is about human-machine collaboration and the emergence of entirely new categories of work, says Prising.
“Despite concerns around youth unemployment and the rise of highly automated factories, what we see is that technology changes work far more than it eliminates it,” he says.
“The sectors creating demand are increasingly concentrated around advanced manufacturing, automation, semiconductors, clean energy, digital services, healthcare and AI-related occupations.”
“Even in highly automated environments, organisations still need people with the skills to design, manage, maintain and optimise these systems.”
And India, the world’s most populous nation? One whose middle class expansion is widely attributed to its once-proliferating outsourcing industry?
Goldman Sachs this month said in a report that 8 to 12 per cent of non-agricultural jobs are under threat of displacement as AI sweeps into manufacturing, finance and education sectors. The unemployed young have even led social eruptions lately, capturing global headlines.
While it is true that generative AI is good at the three Cs – content, coding and customer service – India’s strength has never been labour arbitrage alone but also its ability to adapt, says Prising. “As AI takes over more routine activities, the opportunity shifts towards higher-value services, digital transformation, AI implementation, cybersecurity, data, product engineering and human-centred consulting. India’s demographics and investments in skills development should ensure it is well-suited to adapt.”
Some people believe that, in the headlong rush towards AI adoption, not enough CEOs comprehend the full dimensions of what they are doing, and to what purpose – bandwagoning with others spending hugely on AI because they fear that not doing so might make them appear as if they do not “get technology”, so to speak.
Besides, if these machines are so good and the future is all about collaboration between man and machine, why is it that the gains from these technologies are at best uneven and are not showing up quite enough in the bottom line?
Prising explains that the lack of evidence that AI affects profitability is because the world is in a phase where AI is being used as a tool to tackle, say, two or three tasks in a job with 20 tasks.
The time gained by automating those couple of tasks is probably spent on relaxation or surfing the web – who knows. Eventually, the profit advantage will surface.
“The next wave is end-to-end transformation, and that’s when the gains will be seen,” he says.
“And that is really the recreation of value chains – of how companies can augment and change their value creation chain with AI – as opposed to plonking AI on an existing value creation chain. That will fundamentally alter the nature of work and the nature of jobs – which ones are there, which ones are augmented, and which ones leave.”
As these transformations progress, workers will need to adapt – both in the jobs performed and in their expectations, including the notion of lifetime employment.
In an earlier era, employees sought to earn a company badge from firms such as IBM and GE, or SIA and Singtel, and turn in the same badge at retirement.
But the era of rapid changes of employer, and even multi-jobbing, is at hand. Retirement is also being pushed further out as longevity rises.
Prising, who is the Geneva-based World Economic Forum’s CEO Champion of the Reskilling Revolution, says that as working life extends towards age 70, one has to think of it as a “portfolio of career moves”.
The young, particularly, will be much more open to trying different occupations until they find something they like.
What is more, careers may no longer be all about vertical progression but also a series of lateral moves.
For instance, 90 per cent of Uber drivers do it as their second or third job. You might be driving Uber on Saturday night and walking dogs the next morning for someone else, depending on the stage of life that you are in. How does one prepare for such an employment universe?
It used to be that the young were told to focus on paper qualifications – achieving solid grades in school and college, the better if these were in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines.
A good university, good grades – and it was easier to get your foot in the door of a reputed company and build your life thereon.
But in the AI era, soft skills and real-life experience will be increasingly valued over paper qualifications. Bob Sternfels, global managing partner at McKinsey, the temple of the consulting business, told me in 2024 that the firm had just appointed its first non-graduate partner.
It is a great anecdote, says Prising, who does not seem to be convinced.
Who knows, AI-assisted hiring practices may well throw up such candidates. But human preference will still be to look at which university a candidate attended and what grades were scored.
“It is human behaviour overriding data. You would say ‘It’s weird and not going to last’, and I would say that this is the most lasting element of any technological revolution.” THE STRAITS TIMES
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