Future Of Work

Some technologies don’t just solve problems — they give people their independence back. I rediscovered Liftware, and I was genuinely moved by what it can do. It looks simple: a smart handle connected to everyday utensils. But inside, it’s a powerful piece of engineering designed for people with hand tremors (Parkinson’s, essential tremor, and more). Here’s how it works: 🔹 Sensors detect tiny hand movements in real time 🔹 Micro-motors instantly counteract the tremor 🔹 The spoon or fork stays stable — even if the hand doesn’t The result? Up to 70% less shaking. And for many people, that means eating soup again… without help. This is technology at its best: invisible, intelligent, and deeply human. 💡 My take Most people don’t know this, but Liftware was developed by a small startup before being acquired by Google’s life sciences division (now Verily). What makes it remarkable is the engineering challenge: the device doesn’t try to stop the tremor — it predicts and cancels it. It’s basically a tiny real-time AI system… hidden inside a spoon. This is the future I love: not just smarter devices, but more compassionate ones. If you’ve seen other innovations that genuinely improve people’s lives, I’d love to discover them. What’s one piece of tech-for-good that inspired you recently? #techforgood #innovation #technology #healthtech #accessibility #assistivetechnology #futureofhealth #inclusiveDesign #AI #impact

Cloud Native technologies have long been at the heart of scalable applications. But now, with AI and Agentic Systems, the game is changing!   Unlike traditional AI automation, Agentic AI can make decisions, execute workflows, and adapt dynamically to system changes—without constant human oversight. This means self-healing, self-optimizing, and autonomous cloud-native infrastructure!  Here’s how Agentic AI can transform each layer of Cloud Native skills:  1. Linux & AI-Optimized OS   - AI-powered package managers automatically resolve compatibility issues.   - Agentic AI monitors system logs, predicts failures, and patches vulnerabilities autonomously.  2. Networking & AI-Driven Observability   - AI-driven network forensics using self-learning algorithms to detect anomalies.   - Agent-based routing optimizations, ensuring seamless traffic flow even in congestion.  3. Cloud Services & AI-Augmented Workflows   - Agentic AI predicts cloud workload demand and pre-allocates resources in AWS, Azure, and GCP.   - Autonomous cost optimization adjusts instance types, storage, and compute in real time.  4. Security & AI Cyberdefense Agents   - Self-learning AI security agents actively detect and mitigate cyber threats before they happen.   - Generative AI-powered penetration testing agents simulate evolving attack patterns.  5. Containers & Agentic AI Orchestration   - Autonomous Kubernetes controllers scale clusters before demand spikes.   - Agentic AI continuously optimizes pod scheduling, reducing cold starts and resource waste.  6. Infrastructure as Code + AI Copilots   - AI-driven infrastructure agents automatically refactor Terraform, Ansible, and Puppet scripts.   - Self-adaptive IaC, where AI updates configurations based on usage patterns and compliance policies.  7. Observability & AI-Driven Incident Response   - AI-powered anomaly detection in Grafana & Prometheus—flagging issues before failures.   - Agentic AI handles incident response, running diagnostics and executing pre-approved fixes.  8. CI/CD & Autonomous Pipelines   - Agentic AI writes, tests, and deploys code autonomously, reducing developer toil.   - Self-optimizing pipelines that rerun failed tests, debug, and retry deployment automatically.  The Future: Fully Autonomous Cloud Native Systems!  𝗗𝗲𝘃𝗢𝗽𝘀 𝗮𝘂𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 → 𝗔𝗜-𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝗼𝗯𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 → 𝗔𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗰 𝗔𝗜-𝗱𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝗰𝗹𝗼𝘂𝗱 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗿𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲. The result? Zero-touch, self-managing environments where AI agents handle failures, optimize costs, and secure systems in real time.  𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁’𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗲𝘅𝗰𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗔𝗜-𝗱𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝗰𝗹𝗼𝘂𝗱 𝗶𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂’𝘃𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗹𝘆?

Louder for the people at the back 🎤 Many organisations today seem to have shifted from being institutions that develop great talent to those that primarily seek ready-made talent. This trend overlooks the immense value of individuals who, despite lacking experience, possess a great attitude, commitment, and a team-oriented mindset. These qualities often outweigh the drawbacks of hiring experienced individuals with a fixed and toxic mindset. The best organisations attract talent with their best years ahead of them, focusing on potential rather than past achievements. Let’s be clear this is more about mindset and willingness to learn and unlearn as apposed to age. To realise the incredible potential return, organisations must commit to creating an environment where continuous development is possible. This requires a multi-faceted approach: 1. Robust Training Programmes: Employers should invest in comprehensive training programmes that equip employees with the necessary skills for their roles. This includes on-the-job training, mentorship programmes, online courses, and workshops. 2. Redefining Hiring Criteria: Organisations should revise their hiring criteria to focus more on candidates’ potential and willingness to learn rather than solely on prior experience or formal qualifications. Behavioural interviews, aptitude tests, and probationary periods can help assess a candidate's ability to learn and adapt. 3. Partnerships with Educational Institutions: Companies can collaborate with educational institutions to design curricula that align with industry needs. Apprenticeship programmes, internships, and cooperative education can bridge the gap between academic learning and practical job skills. 4. Lifelong Learning Culture: Encouraging a culture of lifelong learning within organisations is crucial. Employers should provide ongoing education opportunities and support for professional development. This includes continuous skills assessment and access to resources for upskilling and reskilling. 5. Inclusive Recruitment Practices: Employers should implement inclusive recruitment practices that remove biases and barriers. Blind recruitment, diversity quotas, and targeted outreach programmes can help ensure that diverse candidates are given a fair chance. By implementing these measures, organisations can develop a workforce that is adaptable, innovative, and resilient, ensuring sustainable success and growth.

Last week, I described four design patterns for AI agentic workflows that I believe will drive significant progress: Reflection, Tool use, Planning and Multi-agent collaboration. Instead of having an LLM generate its final output directly, an agentic workflow prompts the LLM multiple times, giving it opportunities to build step by step to higher-quality output. Here, I'd like to discuss Reflection. It's relatively quick to implement, and I've seen it lead to surprising performance gains. You may have had the experience of prompting ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini, receiving unsatisfactory output, delivering critical feedback to help the LLM improve its response, and then getting a better response. What if you automate the step of delivering critical feedback, so the model automatically criticizes its own output and improves its response? This is the crux of Reflection. Take the task of asking an LLM to write code. We can prompt it to generate the desired code directly to carry out some task X. Then, we can prompt it to reflect on its own output, perhaps as follows: Here’s code intended for task X: [previously generated code] Check the code carefully for correctness, style, and efficiency, and give constructive criticism for how to improve it. Sometimes this causes the LLM to spot problems and come up with constructive suggestions. Next, we can prompt the LLM with context including (i) the previously generated code and (ii) the constructive feedback, and ask it to use the feedback to rewrite the code. This can lead to a better response. Repeating the criticism/rewrite process might yield further improvements. This self-reflection process allows the LLM to spot gaps and improve its output on a variety of tasks including producing code, writing text, and answering questions. And we can go beyond self-reflection by giving the LLM tools that help evaluate its output; for example, running its code through a few unit tests to check whether it generates correct results on test cases or searching the web to double-check text output. Then it can reflect on any errors it found and come up with ideas for improvement. Further, we can implement Reflection using a multi-agent framework. I've found it convenient to create two agents, one prompted to generate good outputs and the other prompted to give constructive criticism of the first agent's output. The resulting discussion between the two agents leads to improved responses. Reflection is a relatively basic type of agentic workflow, but I've been delighted by how much it improved my applications’ results. If you’re interested in learning more about reflection, I recommend: - Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback, by Madaan et al. (2023) - Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning, by Shinn et al. (2023) - CRITIC: Large Language Models Can Self-Correct with Tool-Interactive Critiquing, by Gou et al. (2024) [Original text: https://lnkd.in/g4bTuWtU ]

If you want to do creative projects but never have the energy, try this: Nature is more than just a backdrop for relaxation; it actively enhances our creative thinking and problem-solving abilities. Getting out into nature with a clear aim to do creative work as a massively underrated tool. Here’s my protocol for an intentional day of personal projects: → 𝗠𝗼𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗥𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗲 Begin your morning by stepping outside. Feel the natural elements (the sun, a breeze, the texture of grass). Just a couple of minutes can really clear the mind, calibrate your senses, and sharpen focus. → 𝗦𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 Carry a notebook and pen on a short walk in a nearby park or natural setting, away from digital distractions. Write down a maximum of 3 things you’d like to focus on. Put a star next to the one that is your highest priority - the one that, once completed, would make the day a success. → 𝗝𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗮𝗹 To get the creative juices flowing, handwrite down a short answer to each of these prompts: • Describe your natural surroundings. • What’s 1 trait you want to exhibit today? • What’s 1 thing you’re grateful for? → 𝗗𝗲𝗲𝗽 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 Curate a workspace with natural elements (e.g., plants, natural light, open windows for fresh air). The more minimal and distraction-free, the better. Brew your hot beverage of choice, take a deep breath, and start your day with a 2-hour uninterrupted block focussed on your highest priority task. → 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗺𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘄𝗮𝗹𝗸𝘀 Introduce short, regular walking breaks in your routine, preferably in natural, green spaces. Experiment with different levels of stimulus: Notebook, no notebook. Music, no music. Use this time for reflection or pondering creative challenges, letting the natural environment stimulate new perspectives. → 𝗪𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗱𝗼𝘄𝗻 As daylight shifts to dusk, allow your mind to naturally transition to relaxation. Under soft lighting, jot down any lingering thoughts or reflections in a journal. Close the cognitive chapter on productivity, and enjoy an evening of leisurely reading, cooking, and resting. -- This is an excerpt from an initiative I recently took part in called 'The nature of work' - a collaboration between Unyoked and LinkedIn. They invited Lizzie Hedding, Samantha Wong, James Hurman, Cayla Dengate, Jimmy Lyell and I to create a guide on using nature to slow down and focus on the things that really matter. 🏕️ One takeaway for me: Whether you're an athlete, VC, or musician... try to build more exposure to the natural world into your daily, weekly, monthly and yearly rhythms. Hope you enjoy the guide as much as we did making it. Link in the comments👇

I entered the sustainability field to build a resilient future for people and the planet - not to wrestle with manual spreadsheets. But as many of us in this space have discovered, the time-consuming logistics of reporting are often a barrier to real progress. At Google, we’ve spent the last two years using our own environmental report as a testing ground for a better way. By leveraging Google Cloud tools to automate data ingestion and claim validation, we’ve shifted from weeks of manual data cleaning to on-demand strategic insights. These technologies don’t replace our experts. Instead, they free our team to focus on strategy and execution rather than repetitive, time-consuming data collection and validation. We’re already seeing how other companies can use these tools to make similar shifts. For example, Equinix moved from manual tracking to a system that collects data from 240+ global sites automatically. Learn more about how Google Cloud is helping sustainability teams spend more time on strategy, not spreadsheets. ⤵️ https://goo.gle/4scTUfR

Your leadership team is underperforming. (And cracking the whip harder won't fix it.) Here's what nobody tells you about accountability: The harder you push, the less they deliver. I've watched CEOs destroy their executive teams this way: 🔥 Public callouts in meetings 🔥 Micromanaging every decision   🔥 Threats disguised as "motivation" 🔥 Fear-based deadline pressure Result: Your best leaders become corporate zombies. They show up. They comply. They stop caring. The expensive truth: Fear creates compliance. Clarity creates commitment. And you need commitment to win. Real story from last month: → CEO constantly berated his team for missing targets → 3 VPs quit in 6 months → Company lost $2M in transition costs alone Different CEO, different approach: → Created radical clarity around expectations → Listened without judgment → Built safety to admit mistakes early → Revenue up 40% in 12 months The difference? One used accountability as a weapon. The other used it as a framework for excellence. The 4 frameworks that create compassionate accountability: 1. RACI Matrix - Ends the "whose job is this?" chaos (Everyone knows their lane AND their value) 2. OKRs - Aligns hearts and minds (Shared goals create shared ownership) 3. EOS Accountability Chart - One person, one seat (Clear ownership without overlapping egos) 4. OGSM - Strategy meets reality (No more "I thought you meant..." conversations) But here's the key: These aren't hammers to hit people with. They're maps to help people win. The paradox of leadership: High standards + High support = High performance High standards + Low support = High turnover Your leadership team doesn't need more pressure. They need more clarity. Because when accountability comes from compassion, not control: → Problems get solved, not hidden → Leaders take ownership, not cover → Teams push forward, not back Stop managing through fear. Start leading through frameworks. Your leadership team is capable of greatness. But only if you create the conditions for it. Save this. Share it with your team. Because the best leaders don't create followers. They create owners. And ownership starts with clarity. P.S. Want a PDF of my Accountability Cheat Sheet? Get it free: https://lnkd.in/dpWsuT4b ♻️ Repost to help a CEO in your network. Follow Eric Partaker for more leadership insights. — 📢 Want to lead like a world-class CEO? Join my FREE TRAINING: "How to Work with Your Board to Accelerate Your Company’s Growth" Thu Jul 10th, 12 noon Eastern / 5pm UK time https://lnkd.in/dCJ-nCxM 📌 The CEO Accelerator starts July 23rd. 20+ Founders & CEOs have already enrolled. Learn more and apply: https://lnkd.in/dgRr89bM

Just out in Harvard Business Review, summary of the Hybrid Experiment results and lessons on how to make hybrid succeed. Experiment: randomize 1600 graduate employees in marketing, finance, accounting and engineering at Trip.com into 5-days a week in office, or 3-days a week in office and 2-days a week WFH. Analyzed 2 years of data. Two key results A) Hybrid and fully-in-office showed no differences in productivity, performance review grade, promotion, learning or innovation. B) Hybrid had a higher satisfaction rate, and 35% lower attrition. Quit-rate reductions were largest for female employees. Four managerial lessons 1) Hybrid needs a strong performance management system so managers don’t need to hover over employees at their desks to check their progress. Trip.com had an extensive performance review process every six months. 2) Coordinate in-office days at the team or company level. Schedule clarity prevents the frustration of coming to an empty office only to participate in Zoom calls. Trip.com coordinated WFH on Wednesday and Friday. 3) Having leadership buy-in is critical (as with most management practices). Trip.com’s CEO and C-suite all support the hybrid policy. 4) A/B test new policies (as well as products) if possible. Often new policies turn out to be unexpectedly profitable. Trip.com made millions of dollars more profits from hybrid by cutting expensive turnover.

If you don’t grab a serious opportunity by 46, there’s a strong chance you’ll be pushed into early retirement by 52. Not by choice— but because the system will quietly stop picking your resume. It’s sad. It’s unfair. But it’s very real. I’ve been in leadership hiring for 25+ years. And every time I forward a capable, experienced candidate aged 50+, the response from HR is almost always the same: “Let’s hold for now.” “Maybe too senior for the role.” No response at all. Meanwhile, reports say human life expectancy is increasing. People are living longer, healthier lives. But strangely, the professional shelf-life hasn’t moved an inch. Why? Because we’ve been conditioned to rely on our resumes to open doors. But after a certain age, your resume alone stops working. So how do you stay relevant? If you want to keep getting hired after 50, you must start building your network like your career depends on it—because it does. Make people remember your name. Be present in industry circles, offline and online. Join forums, write, speak, mentor, and stay visible. Build relationships where you are seen as a business enabler, not just a job seeker. Because while HR may pause at your age, decision-makers won’t—if they know you and trust your value. This isn’t about being social. This is about survival. The future belongs to those who are known, respected, and remembered. Don’t wait for your resume to do the talking. Be in the room. Stay in the game.

This is my honest advice to anyone working in corporate past the age of 45. 49% of India’s formal workforce is now over 45. And quietly, many are being steered toward early retirement, often before they’re ready. For a long time, it bothered me to see seasoned professionals with decades of experience suddenly shifting into consulting or coaching. Not because they planned to, but because the system left them with few choices. The data confirms what we’re seeing: → Career spans have shrunk from 40–45 years to just 20–25. → In tech, only 1 - 1.25% work beyond 50. These people aren’t underperformers. They are leaders, mentors, and steady hands who built the foundations the younger generation can walk on. But today, many are made to question their relevance, even when their experience is more valuable than ever. When self-doubt creeps in, it clouds the view of everything you’ve achieved. I’ve seen it happen, and I’ve felt it too. So the question is: how can we stay relevant, or transition, but on our own terms? 1. Be visible Your work speaks for you only if people can hear it. Write, share, teach, speak. Make your experience known, not as noise, but as wisdom that others can learn from. 2. Think like a leader, not an employee Employees can be replaced. Leaders inspire others to grow. Don’t wait for permission to lead, start where you are. 3. Stay curious You may have experience, but learning never ends. Be open to new technologies, ideas, and even mentorship from younger colleagues. Flexibility isn’t weakness, it’s strength in motion. 4. Plan your next chapter Prepare before the exit comes. Take charge of your finances, explore new paths, and give yourself options, because readiness is freedom. 5. Believe in yourself Your value doesn’t fade, it deepens with perspective. Every setback you’ve faced has shaped you into someone who knows how to rise again. Always remember: you’ve weathered every storm life has thrown your way. You adapted, you grew, and you’re still standing strong. What makes you think you can’t do it again? #GrowthMindset #CareerTransitions #BoundlessWithRamG