About to chat with a colleague? There's a bot who can help with that...

I made a point of popping into the Festival of Work at the Excel exhibition centre in London’s Docklands today. The annual jamboree, hosted by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development in the UK, is a get-together for everyone involved in HR and related fields.

Trade seemed fairly brisk, with exhibitors selling their various wares and speakers talking about things like wellbeing in the workplace, employee engagement, leadership and diversity. Amid the melee, visitors grabbed ice creams from Mr Softee vans and enjoyed back massages. I think there was even some place where you could sit and cuddle dogs to relieve your stress.

You certainly didn’t get the impression of a world about to be turned on its head. No sense of a looming HRmageddon.

But as you may know, the contention of my recent book is that massive change is now on the horizon through AI and that it’s likely to cause widespread redundancy. Not just the literal kind - where employees get their P45s and self-employed people see their gigs evaporate - but also a kind of spiritual or deep-seated psychological redundancy, where humans wonder what they are able to contribute that can’t be done better, quicker and cheaper by a machine.

When AI was mentioned at the event, it seemed to be very much in the context of its positive applications to the world of people management.

I listened to a presentation from two earnest representatives of a business that had built its reputation on psychometric testing and was now adapting it for a generation raised on Gemini. In a nutshell, the idea was that employees would answer a questionnaire and be given a psychological profile, which would then be interpreted by a bot to other members of staff.

Bear with me, because this whole notion is so weird it needs a little more explanation.

Imagine you’re a manager and about to have a one-to-one with a member of your team, for example. In advance of the meeting, you have a chit-chat with the AI about that particular staff member and it tells you how best to address their issues and code your approach most appropriately and effectively to fit their personality.

It wasn’t entirely clear whether the employee would have a similar profile of their manager, but I got the strong impression that maybe everyone in the business or organisation would be encouraged to do the psychometric test. Perhaps it would be a requirement? But if it were voluntary, I was imagining the peer pressure to opt in. Just think of the hullabaloo if someone needed to talk to me and the AI was unable to brief them in advance! Chaos might ensue.

We’re told that 2025/6 is going to be when AI agents enter the workforce the first time in large numbers (posing no threat whatsoever to the raison d’etre of the human agents who will be their co-workers). I wonder if the AI agents will have psychometric profiles too, interpreted by bots to other AI agents? That way, communication in the business will be top notch.

So, yes, the enthusiasts for artificial intelligence were at the event, for sure. And probably also a lot of HR practitioners who may be a little bemused, worried and concerned, but who know the message of their company boards and the UK government is that the AI train is a non-stopping service and we all need to jump on board.

And speaking of the government, Alison McGovern - Minister of State for Employment in the Department for Work and Pensions - was on stage with the CIPD’s Chief Executive Peter Cheese. She was talking about moving the number of economically active adults in the UK from the current figure of 75.1% to 80% over the next few years. In other words, she’s envisaging a world in which employment expands rather than contracts.

This is a laudable aim for a social democratic government and one that I broadly endorse. But, to my mind, it’s a little like walking uphill while facing a Force 10 gale. And given the government’s enthusiasm for AI, perhaps a better analogy is Sir Keir Starmer standing at the top of that hill with a wind machine, while McGovern attempts to keep her foothold.

Of course, we don’t know the time frames for the changes that lie ahead. My hunch is that things will move fairly slowly and stealthily in the remainder of the 20s, before accelerating rapidly in the early 30s. But that is just a hunch. If the gale blows in rather earlier, I wouldn’t be at all surprised or shocked.

For the moment, if I’m allowed one embarrassing - but sadly apt - cliché, we’re in the calm before the storm.

As we left Excel, signs reminded us that next year’s event is already scheduled on 10th and 11th June.