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 fi...