All countries will feel the impact of automation, but at different speeds and in different ways. In this podcast, McKinsey Global Institute looks at its likely impact in China, Europe, and India.
New technologies such as artificial intelligence and automation are reshaping the workplace globally. All countries will feel the impact in some way, shape, or form. In this episode for the McKinsey Global Institute’s New World of Work podcast, MGI directors Jonathan Woetzel and Jacques Bughin and MGI partner Anu Madgavkar examine automation’s likely impact in China, Europe, and India.
Podcast transcript:
Peter Gumbel: Hello and welcome to the latest episode in our series on the new world of work. I’m Peter Gumbel from the McKinsey Global Institute, and today we’ll be taking a look at the quite different ways that new technologies like automation and artificial intelligence will affect work in different parts of the world. Specifically, we’ll be looking at China, Europe, and India. These differences come about for a number of reasons that we explain in our new MGI report on the future of work, which is called Jobs lost, jobs gained: Workforce transitions in a time of automation. Among the reasons for these differences are different levels of economic development, different wage rates, and different potential for automation adoption in different economies.
First, let’s talk about China. Here to do so is Jonathan Woetzel, director of the McKinsey Global Institute, based in Shanghai. Jonathan, perhaps you can start by telling us where the Chinese workforce is at the moment. There’s been an incredible shift over the past 25 years out of farming and into industry. What does the future look like?
Jonathan Woetzel: The workforce is in transition. It’s been like that for a couple of decades. The outlook is for more of the same. First of all, China is only about 52 percent urbanized. There’s roughly another 300 million people who are coming in from the farms to the cities and to work in industry and services. Every year, another 10 million to 12 million people are changing their work. And on top of that, now we’ve got an increase of productivity in that industrial and urban workforce, which is a function of automation but also of just an improvement in management approaches and the investment of capital.
