The death of tech jobs? 1-hour innovation process to a green economy

Having spent last days in New York during the UN Summit of the Future and subsequent New York Climate Week, I can’t help but notice that we’re all becoming much more hopeful. This feels new. I believe we can see a light in the tunnel. From prediction that this year might finally be the first one with lower global emissions to exponentially progressing energy transition, we might be close to the long-awaited tipping point.

In my first Illuminem article posted last year, I predicted that within 18 months people might start re-skilling from tech jobs to climate jobs.

Today, almost 17 months since that post, it seems my bet was not quite wrong.

Tech job openings have reached a multi year low:

At the same time, climate-related (green) jobs are at an all-time high in 2024, growing by approximately 4% last year. In fact, clean energy job creation is now 2x as fast as overall job growth. What’s more, this is still insufficient, as the growth in green job openings is outpacing the increase in green talent in the workforce (22.4% compared to 12.3%). As Forbes reported, green job seekers had a 29% higher chance of getting hired than the general workforce.

This surge is largely driven by major governmental initiatives and an increasing societal shift towards sustainability. The demand for roles such as renewable energy engineers, environmental policy analysts, and sustainability consultants has skyrocketed, reflecting a robust growth trajectory in green sectors. This expansion is part of a broader trend where green jobs are significantly outpacing overall job growth (CleanTechnica)(World Economic Forum)(Presidio Graduate School).

Furthermore, these jobs are not just growing in numbers but are becoming more crucial as every sector of the economy begins to align with green principles. Industries that were traditionally not associated with green jobs are now seeing a shift towards sustainability, emphasizing the widespread integration of green skills across the job market (World Economic Forum).

Overall, the trajectory suggests that green jobs will continue to grow, supported by both policy and market forces that favor sustainable practices and technologies.

Reskilling is ramping up with initiatives such as the American Climate Corps on the climate side and Google’s new $120M education fund on the AI side.

^{Approximate Chart for illustration only. Based on reports by Deloitte and World Economic Forum.}

I believe this is just the beginning and things are only about to accelerate. While I’m not so sure we will see gigantic AI-driven changes in just 6 months from now (as I had predicted in last year’s article originally), the transformation is advancing at an exponential pace and once the tipping point has been reached, we might witness a degree of change no one saw coming, much earlier than predicted.

In the latter part of this article, I’ll explain why the effects of AI may not unfold as quickly as many of us originally anticipated and share insights from a year of research I’ve undertaken to gain a deeper understanding.

But first, I’d love to elaborate on this: in my mind, sustainability is really just efficiency. Please entertain this oversimplification with me for a moment. What could be less efficient than mining and shipping fossil fuels around the planet, only to burn them with relatively low energy output? It’s a mad system. 

Modern methods are far more efficient and, therefore, much cheaper at scale. Solar panel systems (shout out to our partner Nextracker!), electric cars and overall transformation are becoming cheaper and more accessible by the day.

This is where AI-enabled optimizations excel: we now have the ability to derive prescriptive insights from vast data lakes (finally!), we can reorganize supply chains and seek efficiency in ways that were not possible before—all simply due to complexity of incumbent systems.

Every day, you may notice that omnipresent AI functionalities are evolving from useless and often annoying bolt-on gimmicks into useful companions integrated into almost every online system. Giants like Salesforce are betting on the future of AI agents, with their Slack becoming an agent hub. AI "co-workers" joining our teams is only a matter of time—and likely sooner than many expect.

While the sheer amount of energy needed to power the incoming “acres” (hectares) of GPU clusters remains troubling, having companies like Microsoft completely miss their net zero targets, it is also starting to reveal a new opportunity for return of nuclear power and further acceleration of renewables.

Across the board, businesses large and small are beginning the race to develop meaningful AI capabilities to streamline operations and transform for the new "Age of AI.”

The double exponential trend continues, meaning we're seeing new advancements at an ever-increasing pace, while access to this technology is becoming increasingly broader and cheaper.

The transformation is well underway and will only accelerate. The opportunity for an incredibly vast set of optimizations—and, consequently, sustainability—is unprecedented. But first, a major roadblock needs to be addressed: our ability to actually accept this change and re-envision our organizations. And that is a much harder nut to crack.

A lot has happened over those 17 months since my first article here.

As we continued working with clients like JLL, Cisco, and Nextracker, I noticed that implementing meaningful change with AI-powered systems is hard—harder than we thought. And not because of bad models, hallucinations, or the tech at all; those can be controlled.

The real blocker is really something that isn’t technological at all: our resistance to change, attachment to status quo, and fear of the new.

Today, still, around 70% of transformation and 95% of Innovation initiatives fail. This is trillions of dollars and millions of years of collective work time wasted—at a time when we are racing against the clock to prevent the worst effects of climate change, related biodiversity loss, escalating refugee crisis, conflicts, and more.

This is the reason the change will not be as fast as I anticipated in my original article. This realization made me wonder if something—and what!—could be done about it. Over a year ago, I started a deeper research on the subject. I read about 25 books and interviewed people from companies such as Google, Apple, JLL, OpenAI, JPMorgan, Revolut, Comcast, Johnson & Johnson, Snap, Activision/Blizzard, McKinsey & Co., Bain & Co. IDEO, SYP, S&P, SAP, P&G, Microsoft and many more. I began capturing insights and built a simple AI system to help me organize them. All in all, I distilled over 960 insights on unlocking innovation, all correlated with each other, rated and tagged in a way that patterns could start emerge. I consulted these with many friends and advisors.

A madman's errand, perhaps, but I became truly passionate about the idea that even shifting the adoption rate of large organizations by 1% could mean years of progress and billions of dollars worth of impact. And what if it were 5% or 10%?

As I collected the insights, a clear set of observations began to emerge:

• We all disagree what innovation actually means
• Most people don’t understand what unlocks it at all
• We don’t need millions of dollars spent on R&D
• Innovation must be a culture, not an isolated activity
• Faster change, even at the giants with 250,000 or more employees, is very much possible
• Innovation is very hard—not many companies succeed at doing it
• Innovation, really, has one most important rule: you cannot stop! And, therefore, the approach you embrace needs to be extremely difficult to cancel or have its budget cut

Let’s look at Microsoft (and pause for a moment their declining adherence to net zero, which I’m sure will get corrected as soon as the US becomes serious about regulations in the near future). What did Satya Nadella change when he became the CEO? He switched company to an innovation mode, running in cycles (”leaps”). He embraced the “learn it all” vs. “know it all” mindset present before and it resulted in an incredible run of the past decade seen below.

Microsoft [MSFT] share price, Daily $

Even the largest organizations have the ability to change fast and embrace a new direction. I uncovered this and many other stories, examples, and insights, and added them to the shared database.

At one point during my research, my friend (shout out to Peter Corbett!), suggested that I write a book about it. And so, I set aside about 4h a day and… wrote one, for the first time in my life, with a simple objective: to present what emerged in my research.

What I did not expect: I just published this book on Amazon, and within short 3 weeks it became a #1 Amazon Bestseller in multiple categories!

The LEAP Guide presents a simple, pragmatic manual to driving an innovation culture and unlocking real change, without spending large amounts of money. This lightweight, highly-compatible framework is so inexpensive in resources that it becomes difficult to stop, therefore enabling a cyclical upgrade pattern that scales through the entire organization.

In short, it is a framework for driving innovation culture in this new Age of AI, necessitating only 1h/week from our teams.

I believe we are at an incredible inflection point in human history. While there are reasons for concern and technology choices must be well thought-out, we are now entering a time where, given the right frameworks and ability to adapt, every branch of our global economy will transform at an accelerated pace. Those who do it first will gain advantage in their industries, but collectively, I believe, the real beneficiary will be the biosphere—with cleaner, better-organized supply chains, manufacturing, general industries, built environment, energy, cooling, farming, and more.

Who knows, with enough luck, we might just be able to leap over the “Polycrisis” and find ourselves building a positive future! Or, as we say at my company, a future that works for everyone.

I will make another prediction and say that when in another 18 months from now we look at where we are, it will be clear that AI is a major contributor to solving climate change. At the same time, the accelerating pace of technological change will make it widely accepted that our teams and their culture must learn to embrace the new in much shorter cycles than ever before. This is where I hope The LEAP Guide will make a meaningful contribution.

Thank you for your time!

With this article I’d love to offer 10 books for free (shipping included!) to the readers of Illuminem. Share this article and send me a message with a screenshot ( matt@future.works ). I’ll ship a printed copy of the book to the first 10 people who share!

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.