Generative AI Is Not Just Changing Work. It Is Reallocating It.
By Michael G. Jacobides, Sir Donald Gordon Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation and Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School; M. Dalbert Ma, PhD Candidate in Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School; Amartya Das, Principal at BCG; and Matt Langione, Managing Director and Partner at BCG.
Every major technological shift invites two bad habits: panic and oversimplification. Generative AI has triggered both. On one side are those who insist that white-collar sectors are about to be hollowed out. On the other are those who reduce the whole matter to productivity: faster drafting, cheaper analysis, better search, more efficient workflows. Neither story is entirely wrong. But both are far too narrow.
The more consequential question is not whether GenAI makes knowledge work faster. It is whether it changes how knowledge work is organized in the economy: which organizations do which tasks, what remains bundled inside firms, what moves across firm boundaries, and where new forms of value creation begin to appear. That is the larger shift now coming into view.
More importantly, this is not just a future possibility. Firms are already responding. Even at this early stage, organizations appear to be adjusting what they emphasize, how they describe themselves, and, in effect, the value they claim to provide. Technology may be moving fast, but firms are not standing still. They are beginning to readjust their value propositions, or at the very least, their public self-descriptions, in response. Our research explores these early responses, and what it finds is not panic or collapse, but a meaningful adjustment already under way, one likely to deepen as the technology improves.
This matters because knowledge work has never simply been a list of tasks. For decades, much of it remained bundled inside established organizational forms because it relied on tacit expertise, apprenticeship, repeated interaction, and difficult coordination. Customers were not just buying a report, an analysis, or a recommendation. They were buying a package: framing the problem, making sense of ambiguity, synthesizing fragments of evidence, exercising judgment, and providing enough legitimacy and reassurance for someone to act. The organization itself was part of the offering, because knowledge was embedded in teams, routines, and reputation, not neatly codified in a playbook.
Source(s):
School, L. B. (2026, May 1). Generative AI Is Not Just Changing Work. It Is Reallocating It. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/lbsbusinessstrategyreview/2026/05/01/generative-ai-is-not-just-changing-work-it-is-reallocating-it/?utm_source=elinfonet&utm_medium=referral