Chief Product Officer at IFS with a passion for developing and adapting technology that adds differentiating value for businesses.gettyAI is causing a shift in our world, the magnitude of which has not been seen since the invention of the printing press. Just as the printing press led to the Age of Reason, so too is the Age of AI beginning. The consequences of the Age of AI are vast, and undoubtedly, even our wildest predictions on what the future holds will differ vastly from what will be our new reality.Sitting in the transition period of such a seismic shift leads to a lot of speculation. And naturally, this landed on the workforce with questions of how AI will shape existing businesses, and what business and job fields will be epiphenomenal to the rise of AI. However, my interests lie in who and what will make up the workforce. While catastrophists say that AI will replace us all, and the denialists say we will all be fine, the answers—as is usually the case —are more likely to sit somewhere in between. As AI becomes more integrated into the workforce, and as innovations accelerate, it becomes clearer that the workforce of the future will be made up of three things. People, yes, but alongside them, two new kinds of colleagues: digital workers and robots.Yet, while the Age of AI is thought by many to be taking place in the cloud, in the metaverse, or indeed, anywhere in the abstract, nowhere will it be more consequential than in the industries that keep the physical world running.The Role Of Digital AgentsFrom the factory floor to the oil rig, skilled labor is getting harder to find as experienced workers retire and tacit knowledge leaves with them. AI is starting to fill that gap, and as it does, it’s also changing how work itself gets managed.For decades, that balance of power sat entirely with people: humans decided what needed doing, who did it and when. Now, that decision-making is starting to be shared between people and a digital worker. In practice, a digital worker is an agentic AI tool with a variable degree of autonomy, capable of identifying a piece of incoming work, analyzing it and deciding who’s best placed to do it, whether that’s a person, a robot or both. What makes this genuinely interesting is that the digital worker is starting to take on a coordinating role once held only by managers and dispatchers.While automation is a central role of a digital worker, it does not replace humans or act with total autonomy. The purpose is to give time back to human colleagues, allowing them to reclaim hours lost to admin and repetitive tasks. Autonomy is not absolute; a digital worker that flags a decision back to its human colleagues for judgment and final say is a sign the system is working exactly as intended. You wouldn’t expect an intern to decide on processes unilaterally, and nor should you expect a digital worker to.The Role Of RobotsAsk most people what a robot looks like and they’ll describe something out of science fiction: a humanoid, walking and talking, doing a person’s job. It’s a compelling image, but it’s not what’s actually happening on the factory floor. Humanoids are getting better, and they’ll have their place, but right now they’re still in demonstrations and headlines rather than doing industrial work. The real progress is more subtle and considerably less cinematic—robots built for one task, done extremely well. There’s no single robot that can do everything, and that’s the point. Some are built for inspection, moving across a structure to look for faults a person would need hours to find. Some handle repetitive physical tasks that wear people down over years of doing them. One example I have recently observed is from a marine paint maker. Rather than sending crews to periodically scrape and repaint ship hulls, they built a robot that continuously cleans the hull itself, which is extending the life of the paint and cutting fuel costs from the reduced drag. It’s a purpose-built machine doing a job no person particularly wanted in the first place.This is where I think the most interesting innovation will happen over the next few years. We will begin to see a growing range of specialized robots as a genuine part of the workforce, as opposed to a one-size-fits-all model. That means matching the right robot to the right task the way you’d match a skilled technician, and maintaining them the way you’d invest in any valuable team member. A robot that isn’t serviced on schedule, or is assigned to a job outside its capability, fails the same way a mismanaged human team does: through poor planning, not poor technology.Where People Come InNone of this works as three separate stories. The real value sits in the handoffs between colleagues, the moment a robot’s finding becomes a digital worker’s decision, and a digital worker’s decision becomes a technician’s judgment call. The transformation is happening in workflows that move seamlessly between people, digital workers and robots rather than routing everything through a single point.For people, this changes what the job looks like rather than whether the job exists. A century ago, entire trades built around cutting and storing ice disappeared almost overnight when refrigeration arrived, and the people who did that work moved into new roles, including the assembly lines that came to define modern manufacturing. New roles are already emerging around managing this mixed workforce: people who train digital workers, decide what decisions they’re trusted to make on their own, and maintain and schedule the robots working alongside them. These are new skilled jobs.​This all feels familiar. Every generation of industrial leaders has had to answer the same underlying question: How do we get the most out of everyone and everything we work with? For the first time, the answer includes people, digital workers and robots operating as one workforce.Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?