Five Forecasts for the Future of Work - by Matt McDonagh

Wealth Systems

SubscribeSign in

Five Forecasts for the Future of Work

Matt McDonagh<br>Jun 28, 2026

Share

I don’t think people have metabolized what is about to happen to work.<br>Not jobs.<br>Work.<br>Jobs are the legal wrapper. Work is the underlying economic activity: thinking, deciding, writing, building, coordinating, checking, selling, supporting, analyzing, researching, operating.<br>That layer is being rewritten.<br>In GLM-5.2 Proves AI Comes for All Moats, I argued that the real story was not one more model release. The real story was the repricing of intelligence. Capable models are getting cheaper, more open, more deployable, and good enough for more real work.<br>In The Shift From Chat to Command, I argued that AI is moving from conversation to delegation. The chatbot was the warm-up act. The agent is the labor system. The human no longer asks for information. The human assigns work.<br>And in Token Economics Will Drive Everything, I argued that companies are beginning to treat tokens as a substitute for labor. The important question is no longer “How do we get employees to use AI?” The important question is “How do we turn tokens into labor at the lowest sustainable cost?”<br>Put those three pieces together and the conclusion gets uncomfortable.<br>The future of work is not remote work.<br>It’s not hybrid work.<br>It’s not four-day workweeks.<br>Those are downstream schedule debates from the old labor model.<br>The real future of work is this:<br>Cheap intelligence becomes available everywhere.<br>Humans learn to command machine labor.<br>Companies learn to route, price, cache, govern, and measure that labor.<br>Then the structure of the firm changes. That is the major shift.<br>Here are five forecasts for what comes next.<br>Future of Work - Forecast #1

The Prompt Becomes the Work Order

The first era of AI was asking.<br>The next era is assigning.<br>That sounds subtle.<br>Nothing could be further from the truth. There’s nothing subtle about moving from chatting to commanding.<br>A question asks for a response. A command assigns responsibility. The interface changes from “explain this” to “go do this.” That is the entire economic transition.<br>In the chatbot era, AI was mostly a faster search bar, tutor, brainstorming partner, or writing assistant. Useful, but still bounded by the human’s immediate attention. The human stayed inside the work loop at every step.<br>In the agent era, the human defines the objective, gives constraints, exposes tools, and reviews the result.<br>That is different.<br>The prompt becomes the work order.<br>The thread becomes the workspace.<br>The agent becomes the production unit.<br>This is already happening in software because software is the easiest place for it to happen first. Code is machine-readable. Repos have tests. Terminals return logs. Git produces diffs. CI systems pass or fail. The whole environment is already structured for delegation and verification.<br>But this will not stay in software.<br>The same pattern moves into finance, law, sales, customer success, recruiting, research, marketing, operations, compliance, and executive support.<br>A sales leader will not ask an AI to “summarize this account.”<br>They will assign: review the account, inspect product usage, compare CRM history, identify expansion risk, draft the account plan, create the follow-up sequence, and flag the three places where a human needs to intervene.<br>A lawyer will not ask an AI to “explain this clause.”<br>They will assign: review this contract against our fallback language, identify deviations, rank the negotiation risk, produce a redline, and prepare a partner memo.<br>An investor will not ask an AI to “research this company.”<br>They will assign: build the market map, inspect competitors, review founder history, pull relevant filings, summarize customer signals, stress-test the narrative, and prepare the diligence packet.<br>That is not chat. That is command.<br>Life in the Singularity<br>The Shift From Chat to Command

OpenAI just published one of the most important papers of the AI age, and it’s not a research paper about the next advance in technology… it’s focused on the economics of work as we enter the agentic age…<br>Read more<br>3 days ago · 4 likes · Matt McDonagh

The people who learn to package work clearly will outperform the people who merely ask clever questions.<br>This is the first forecast: the basic interface of knowledge work becomes delegation.<br>Not everyone will be good at it. We’ve seen this play out already. The better you are at communication, project management and lateral thinking… the more powerful you will become.<br>That matters.<br>Because delegation is a skill. Objective-setting is a skill. Scoping is a skill. Constraint design is a skill. Review is a skill. Knowing when the work is good enough is a skill.<br>The future worker is not just prompt-literate.<br>The future worker is command-literate.<br>Future of Work - Forecast #2

Headcount Stops Being the Primary Unit of Work

For the last century, companies have mostly...