People

Salesforce's futurist: If companies don't adapt to remote work, employees will leave

A new Salesforce study found that 60% of people expect remote work to be the norm, and most are embracing it.

Peter Schwartz

Peter Schwartz, Salesforce's senior vice president of strategic planning, thinks remote work is here to stay.

Photo: Peter Schwartz

It's not a surprise, and it's no longer a new idea, but Salesforce executive and futurist Peter Schwartz thinks we need radical social change to embrace the shifting future of work. He shared his thoughts about how companies and society can prepare for the future following the release of a new survey from Salesforce, which shows that more than half of the global population believe remote work and flexible schedules are the new normal.

  • Salesforce surveyed more than 20,000 global respondents in a range of industries and income levels, and more than 60% said that remote work will become the new norm. Around 40% of Americans said they would switch jobs if it meant they could work remotely.
  • Schwartz, the senior vice president for strategic planning at Salesforce, said that means companies need to cater to a range of expectations to make workers happy and attract talent. "There's a lot of diversity in people's expectations," he said. "Companies are going to have to respond to that diversity."

Remote work obviously doesn't affect everyone equally. The shift to remote work has caused what's been called the "first female recession," a reversal of a decade's worth of progress in the fight for pay and workplace equity. Career advancement opportunities often change for women when they have kids, Schwartz said: They are generally expected to shoulder a larger burden of the child-rearing responsibilities, which can create a disproportionate drag on women's advancement in the workplace.

  • Schwartz's solution? Changing how couples agree to split home and childcare assignments, and even redesigning the home to include spaces like "the classroom room" and "the home television studio."
  • "We were agricultural and semi-agricultural, husband and family and wife all worked together," he said. "Life was centered around the home. That's in many ways where we are heading once again."

Aside from the huge interest in remote work, the survey illustrated the importance of technical skills and job training in addressing the global social and racial inequalities exacerbated by the pandemic. Minority communities were hardest hit by the pandemic's economic consequences, and, according to the survey, about 74% of Americans and an even larger portion of the global workforce believe that access to job opportunities is not improving.

For Schwartz, the answer to some of that inequality lies in the fact that 67% of U.S. workers say they don't have in-demand hard skills. By designing job training programs to change that number, businesses — but not really governments, which don't have the resources, he said — can help address the inequalities laid bare by the last six months of crisis.

  • Lots of leaders in tech and business agree with him. Google has planned a massive investment in job skills training at HBCUs, and nearly half of IBM's job openings don't require a traditional four-year college degree.
  • Scott Galloway, notorious for railing against the high cost of private universities, has long urged a massive public investment in trade schools, although he might disagree with Schwartz's assertion that businesses and not public institutions should do the work.
  • "It needs to be pervasive and large-scale," Schwartz said, "but the particulars are not that expensive. The honest truth is it's a hell of a lot cheaper than building a university."

A version of this story will appear in tomorrow's Source Code newsletter. Sign up here.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins