Inaugural Lecture A.Y. 23/24 - Raffaella Sadun: Reskilling in the Age of AI

https://www.carloalberto.org/event/in...

Opening Addresses
Giorgio Barba Navaretti, President, Fondazione Collegio Carlo Alberto
Alberto Anfossi, Secretary General, Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo 
Stefano Geuna, Rector, University of Turin

Inaugural Lecture
Raffaella Sadun
Professor of Business and Administration, Harvard Business School

Introduction by
Paolo Ghirardato, Dean, Fondazione Collegio Carlo Alberto

Closing remarks
Maurizio Molinari, Editor in Chief, La Repubblica


The rapid evolution of new technologies is reshaping the landscape of skills and occupations, impacting organizations across diverse industries and at a global level. The OECD projects that approximately 1.1 billion jobs will undergo significant transformation due to technology within the next decade. Notably, the ability to adapt to these evolving occupational demands varies widely among firms and countries, exerting substantial influence on productivity growth at both micro and macro levels. As we navigate these technological waves, the imperative to reskill — through training programs designed to facilitate the transition from obsolete to in-demand occupations — has gained prominence, particularly in response to the rise of new AI-based technologies. The talk  will explore the feasibility of implementing large-scale reskilling programs within a reasonable time frame leveraging new research on the topic. The discussion will delve into the challenges and opportunities associated with such initiatives for individuals, firms, and policy makers.
Raffaella Sadun is Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and is a Co-Chair of Harvard Business School’s Project on Managing the Future of Work and co-PI of the Digital Reskilling Lab. Her research focuses on managerial and organizational drivers of productivity and growth in corporations and the public sector. She co-founded several large-scale projects to measure management practices and managerial behavior in organizations, such as the World Management Survey, the Executive Time Use Study, and the first large scale management survey in hospitals, MOPS-H, conducted in partnership with the US Census Bureau. Her work has helped uncover the extent to which the diffusion of “basic” management and organizational practices varies across organizations within and across countries, and how this affects productivity at the micro and macro level. Sadun currently co-leads the Digital Reskilling Lab at HBS, where she studies the effectiveness of large-scale digital training investments made in private and public sector organizations. She also serves as director of the of the National Bureau of Economic Research Working Group in Organizational Economics, faculty co-chair of the Harvard Project on the Workforce.