Last week, I served as a judge at the HP Future of Work Accelerator Pitch Fest.
My fellow judges were Antara Lahiri, director of the Micron Foundation for Asia Pacific and Europe; Catherina Gioino, a multimedia journalist and urbanist; and Michele Malejki, the HP executive who leads the Accelerator program.
Together, we evaluated organizations working to help young people and underserved communities gain skills and experience as AI changes the labor market.
The pitches offered a useful look at practical approaches to career preparation. Let's discuss what stood out. I'll close with my Product of the Week, the HP OmniBook Ultra 14 AI PC.
AI is changing the work available to people entering the labor market. At the Pitch Fest, the participating organizations presented ways to help them build experience, find training, and reach employers.
The Future of Work Accelerator is a joint initiative of HP Inc. and the HP Foundation, with training support from MIT Solve and Global Impact Advisors. It aims to expand access to technology, skills, and economic opportunities.
Each selected organization receives $100,000 in funding, $100,000 in HP technology and solutions, and six months of virtual training. To understand why this level of investment and initiative is so absolutely vital today, we first need to confront the ugly, unvarnished reality of what AI is doing to the modern workforce.
I've written extensively about the AI job displacement wave and what I call the "price parity trap." For decades, the tech industry has argued that automation can create new opportunities even as it changes or removes existing jobs. AI is testing that promise, particularly for people trying to enter fields where junior employees have traditionally learned through routine work.
Generative AI doesn't just automate manual labor or repetitive data entry; it automates cognition, analysis, and generation. For some white-collar and entry-level tasks, AI can already compete on speed and cost, raising questions about how newcomers will gain experience.
As companies put AI to work on tasks such as basic coding, preliminary research, and first drafts, some of the assignments that helped junior employees learn may change or disappear. Employers and educators will need other ways to provide that experience.
This creates a troubling question for the next generation: How does a young adult gain the experience employers require if AI takes over some of the assignments that once provided it?
This crisis is compounded by a catastrophic, systemic failure within our existing educational institutions. Our schools and universities are overwhelmingly anchored to an industrialized, 20th-century model of rote memorization, delayed specialization, and standardized testing. They are charging astronomical, debt-inducing tuition to prepare students for a world that ceased to exist the moment ChatGPT went mainstream in late 2022.
By the time a traditional university updates its curriculum and gets board approval to include basic AI literacy, the foundational models have evolved three generations. Academia moves at the glacial speed of bureaucracy; AI moves at the exponential speed of compute.
If educational institutions cannot adapt quickly enough, many young adults could enter the workforce without the skills or experience employers increasingly expect. That would make an already difficult transition harder, especially for students who have taken on substantial debt.
The event w…