FOBO Is the New Business Buzzword. Here’s What You Need to Know.

• FOBO was the new buzzword floating around Davos this year.
• The term represents employees’ fears of being made obsolete by AI advances.
• Reverse mentoring and targeted upskilling can help employees stay relevant, business leaders told BI.

Rapid AI advances present an alluring opportunity for businesses to boost productivity and efficiency.

But while CEOs battle their FOMO and race to adopt the new technology, their employees are experiencing a different side of the AI revolution — FOBO, the fear of becoming obsolete.

It refers to workers’ fears that the speed of AI development is outpacing the reskilling of employees, leaving them redundant in the workplace.

According to recent Gallup polling, FOBO is on the rise. 22% of US workers surveyed said they were worried their jobs would become obsolete because of technology, up from 15% in 2021.

FOBO was a buzzword that kept popping up around this year’s Davos last week.

In a panel titled “Closing the Jobs Gap,” Singapore’s president, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, warned that a global jobs crisis is looming and called for governments and employers to continually invest in workers to increase the chances that AI complements their skills instead of rendering them obsolete.

Business leaders should be just as interested in doubling down on upskilling initiatives as they are purchasing the latest AI tools, Ravin Jesuthasan, a renowned future-of-work expert and author of “The Skills-Powered Organization,” told Business Insider.

There’s an ROI incentive to ensure their workers don’t get left behind, he said.

“Just giving people access to Chat GPT, won’t get you a return,” said Jesuthasan. Adoption rates tend to be low when workers are just handed a tool, he said.

First, companies should make all training mandatory and set aside time for learning during the working day to encourage engagement, Jesuthasan said. But they should also be strategic in how they train the workforce, he said.

Where you really get the ROI is by identifying exactly what work is going to be substituted by AI, Jesuthasan explained. Employers can then take workers who have been freed up, assess what new skills they need, and retrain and deploy them with those skills to drive more growth, he said.

Rafee Tarafdar, Chief Technology Officer of Infosys, the Indian tech giant, also said that his company was seeing great success with its in-house learning platform.

Infosys has updated the system with Gen AI courses and created an incentive program that rewards employees when they complete modules. Employees are spending an average of 30 minutes a day learning on the platform, he said.

The platform’s on-the-go nature was a big draw, he said. “If an employee wants to learn anytime, anywhere, on any device, they should have access to it.”

Tarafdar also agreed that differentiating employees based on how they’ll use AI was key to upskilling them effectively.

“We recognize that some of them will be consumers of AI, which means they will use the AI tools in order to become more productive and efficient, and some of them will be creators of AI. And then somewhere in between, we’ll have builders, those whose skills will change.”

He said that by developing courses in such a focused way, each employee is learning how to drive value for their specific job.

Reverse mentoring

FOBO could be a particular problem among more senior workers, Jesuthasan said. They might delegate tasks to a secretary or team rather than AI, and may not have received any significant technical training for 20 years, he said.

An approach Jesuthasan thinks will be effective in bridging the age gap is “reverse mentoring,” where more mature workers partner up with younger folks who may be more adept with modern technology.

But it’s not just digital skills, Jesuthasan said. Younger generations also have transversal skills and a different worldview that will become more useful in the AI future, he said.

“They’re more adept because they’ve grown up in a much more volatile world. They’ve not had the luxury of saying, I’ll be an engineer for life,” said Jesuthasan.

Ultimately, though, individuals have to motivate themselves to avoid becoming redundant, the future-of-work expert said.

“Every one of us has to really force ourselves to be curious,” he said. “The company can provide resources, the company can provide the space for re-skilling and upskilling, but the individual really has to bring the impetus for change.”