mobility matters, S4 episode 7: global mobility: AI and the future of work

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Kristi: Welcome to Mobility Matters, the Cartus podcast. I’m your host, Kristi Lund, Director of Strategic Business Solutions, and on today’s episode, we’re going to be tackling the future of work with a special focus on mobility.

And we have some amazing guests joining us. So, we’re really excited for today. First up is Greg Lindsay. Greg wears many hats. He’s the senior fellow for Applied Research and Foresight at new cities, a senior fellow at MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab and a partner at Future Map, a geo strategic and climate advisory firm based in Singapore.

He thinks, writes, and speaks about the future of cities and mobility for organizations around the globe. And if that’s not enough, he’s a two-time Jeopardy champion and the only human to go undefeated against IBM’s artificial intelligence, Watson. Greg recently wowed us at our annual Client Forum, returning for a second time to deliver his keynote speech, and now he’s back to share more of his insights on our podcast. So welcome Greg.

Greg: Thanks, Kristi. It’s great to be back.

Kristi: And joining Greg, we have Matt Tebbe, our very own CEO and President at Cartus. Matt is focused on building a strong future-ready organization rooted in operational excellence and innovation. Throughout his career, Matt has emerged as a powerhouse of transformation and strategy. Before Cartus, Matt served as the General Manager of group products for the education technology firm Riverside Insights, where he led a large business unit that supported student growth and equity in more than 6,000 schools.

Matt also held top leadership positions at IT consulting firm, Booze Allen Hamilton and Equifax, where he worked as the Australia/New Zealand region HR, technology leader, establishing Australia’s largest native pre-employment screening business and launching a new workforce solutions offering in the region. Matt has a knack for setting a strategic vision and executing plans that open up new avenues for revenue, reputation and stable growth, something he’s been expertly doing since taking on the CEO role at Cartus in 2023.

And Matt, I believe this is your first time joining us here on Mobility Matters. So welcome, thank you.

Matt: It’s great to be here.

Kristi: Wonderful. All right, so jumping in, Greg. The last time we spoke was back in 2022 on our podcast, and the “great resignation” was highlighted as one of the key trending impacting trends impacting global mobility. What do you think the equivalent trend is for 2025 and beyond? What do our listeners need to watch out for when building and managing their mobility programs across the US and Canada?

Greg: Yeah, a lot has changed since 2022. I mean, I think the biggest difference since I was last here is that we have the chat GPT moment, right? And generative AI became the thing, the thing of all things. And I particularly think of that one, you know, if the “great resignation” represented a moment of really sort of worker power or at least seeing that they had the upper hand to have choice and define their lifestyles. Now we’re at this moment where there’s a lot of chatter about whether generative AI is really beginning to eat its way into workforces, particularly among younger workers, where we’re seeing in some of the data there about youth unemployment rates ticking upward, etc. there. So, I think that’s like the really big trend. A lot of organizations are asking themselves at various levels, how many workers do we actually need? And can we expand ourselves through using generative AI tools? And so, I think it’s really interesting, because this question could go in a number of different directions.

What I’d like to see it do is cause organizations to ask themselves, “Well, you know, if we can spin up any kinds of, you know, number of AI coworkers, one, why aren’t we chasing the best talent wherever it is in the world?” And maybe it’ll leave more organizations to think about, we should be focused on attracting talent wherever it may lie, versus, these questions that we should be pulling everyone back to the office. But I would say the reverse could also be true. We could see this notion of the people who are most human. Need to be face-to-face. We need to emphasize what is the most human and organic about it, and create those kinds of connections, because everything else can be done via AI tools.

Kristi: Absolutely. And Matt, are you we seeing the same trends globally as what Greg just highlighted? Of course, AI, we talked a lot about North America. Are we hearing it [in] other places?

Matt: Absolutely. I mean, AI is definitely not just a North American phenomenon, and we see that with some of the tools that are coming out of China and other places. So, the impact of AI is definitely a global phenomenon. And then, as Greg was just saying, too, the idea of just getting talent where it is, versus having to move talent. That’s definitely having an impact on mobility as well, because it’s not simply the traditional, you know, “Let’s take our US-based talent and push them out globally.” It’s, “Let’s figure out where the best talent is”. And you know, that’s turning into short-term assignments, that’s turning into temporary assignments, that’s turning into one-way assignments. And it’s not us out. It’s, “Hey, the best person may be in Greenland, and let’s move them to Denmark.” So, companies are, at least the most progressive ones, are definitely thinking more globally and thinking about their workforce as a global workforce versus a US-based one.

Greg: Related to that. And there’s also this shift I’m starting to see here where organizations are really rethinking their workspace too, where their CEOs have avatars of themselves and these other sorts of really fun tricks. But they’re also re-shifting. That office space is becoming pure collaborative space, that it’s no longer a container in which to house workers. So, they are really rethinking about what is an office for, and how do we basically maximize the human-to-human connection.

So, it’d be really interesting to see how these new, I think Microsoft calls them frontier firms, obviously heard about centaur workers of human AI, maybe we’ll see centaur firms as well. Yeah, there’s a lot of rethinking going on right now about, you know, what is the best combinations of people, machines, places to do work and everything else.

Kristi: That’s so interesting. Greg, I was at a conference last year where I saw my first AI twin of a CEO, and she is saying that her goal is that her twin will then take the one-on-one meetings that are just kind of the day-to-day check ins. And it blows my mind that that’s even an option. So, I’ll be super curious in a couple of years when we talk again, hopefully, what truly has been enacted in the realm of AI and talking about office spaces and that brings us to remote work. And I know we talked a lot about this last time as well, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on what strategies companies can use to keep remote workers engaged and productive, because we know it’s not going away.

Greg: Yeah, the most interesting thing I’ve seen there, I spent a lot of time the last few years talking to the folks at Tulsa Remote and if listeners are familiar with this program, this is the one out of Tulsa, Oklahoma. It’s an initiative of the George Kaiser Family Foundation, where they’re the ones who famously, will pay you $10,000 to move to Tulsa if you have a job that’s remote in another state. But one of the things they do really well, and this has been studied by Raj Chowdhury at Harvard Business School and others there, is not just designing programs for remote workers to settle down roots there, but really creating the sort of like local innovation community where remote workers can embed with locals and share and learn from each other and spend more time with, really their peers than their coworkers. And I think that’s one of the most interesting things we’ve seen for keeping remote workers engaged. It’s no longer being isolated in your bedroom or any sort of single space, but figuring out how to get them into communities, and it’ll be really interesting to see what more can be done in that regard.

Brian Eno, the musical artist and producer once called the senior engineering like, how do you engineer a scene of geniuses? Maybe won’t go that far, but Tulsa Remote has done this really good job of cultivating this entire sort of community of practice around all the remote workers who otherwise might feel lonely and isolated there and using that to really seed the ground for all of the local talent that’s in Tulsa. So, I’d like to see more of that, because my big takeaway of hanging out with Tulsa Remote is remote work is full of paperwork. So much documentation to embed those practices. And I think if organizations only focus on that: “Here’s everything you need to know, or you can search about us.” And I think, you know, you risk a lack of engagement and retention issues. But if you can engage people by helping them, find a community around them, wherever they may be, I think that’s gonna be a real superpower for organizations.

Kristi: Absolutely. And Matt, Cartus is a company that has really embraced remote work across the globe. So how do you and Cartus’ leadership team foster a successful working environment for Cartus employees being remote?

Matt: I mean, certainly the engagement is a big piece of that. We’ve invested a lot in our Cartus Community Champions in all of our regions, to engage the local staff there to do more than just the work, you know, whether it’s coffee talks or fun events or in-person meetups. We’re aiming to do globally in-person events towards the end of the summer. We’re also just focused on recognition. That we’re going to be doing a really big push in July for all the things that Cartus has been working on and achieving over the past year/18 months, a lot of it’s coming to a head over the next month, and so we want to make sure that people are recognized and feeling valued for their contributions. So, we’re going to be making a big push there as well.

But the big thing, it’s interesting you talk about the avatar CEO, because you may get an efficiency benefit, but that comes at the expense of the personal connection and the personal relationship. And again, going back to that recognition. How good do you feel if it’s a virtual avatar acknowledging your accomplishment, versus the CEO or the senior leadership, who’s there and who’s taking their time to say what you’ve done is important? So, I think continuing to have those personal connections makes a really big deal as well.

Kristi: Absolutely. And Greg, this makes me think of something you’d mentioned during our Client Forum, the 30-minute cities. Am I quoting that correctly? Is that right? 30-minute cities?

Greg: Yeah, that comes from the idea. Well, I’m curious to this question, but just for listeners, the idea of the 30 minute city goes back to Italian physicist, Cesar Marchetti, who noted that, basically, going back to at least as far as ancient Greece, we all tend to live our lives in a way where you travel from the center of your life to the periphery in 30 minutes each way. And if you look at average US commute times, at least before the pandemic, last number I saw was, I think it’s like 26 minutes actually, today. So, you can see this time and only the technology changes, we have this sort of time constant built in place.

Matt: Clearly, that study was not done in Atlanta traffic! I’m just going to say that.

Greg: Well, this is why we saw the embrace of remote work people. It’s not that people hated being in the office. They hated their commutes and like everything goes back to housing markets and travel and everything else, but yeah, Kristi, where did you want to take that?

Kristi: So, the reason why it made me think of this is, do you think that a lot of employees will start seeking out those types of cities because of remote work, because they don’t have those connections in person? And they want those community connections. Do you see that increasing in the near future?

Greg: That’s a great question. I think so. I mean, we sort of saw that already happen. You know, the huge wave of people who moved out, moved out of big coastal, dense cities, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, if you count as the third coast towards the Sun Belt, and pouring into, like the exurbs of Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston and the Texas triangle, and Phoenix. Like, yeah, you saw some of that. People were redefining their personal space, time, cost calculations and trying to avoid, you know, now they no longer had to make those commutes during the pandemic era. They were choosing very differently.

So, yeah, so people were sort of optimizing for that. But the countervailing trend of that is a lot of people are spending more time on screens. We know, we’ve seen in, you know, Derek Thompson’s great cover story for The Atlantic, the anti-social century. I mean, people are just basically spending more and more time at home alone, on screens, and that has all sorts of mental health outcomes. So, yeah, I think there’s a ripe time here for people to actually settle closer at home. And I think remote work, or hybrid or these kinds of other forms here that don’t require punishing commutes across galactic metros like Atlanta’s is an opportunity to rethink what those connections are.

And that’s why I spent a lot of time with studying coworking. Studying coworking and studying the idea of flexible workspaces. I think there’s a lot of other arrangements whose time may come back around now. Adam Newman is safely away from WeWork and that stigma has gone away, but people are definitely seeking connection, for sure, which is why they’re turning to AI companions, among other things.

Kristi: I would definitely say, and Matt, you probably see this as well. Within our client base, we’re seeing a lot of organizations with increasing employee-initiated moves. So, they’re requesting to go to certain locations, and companies are asking, “What should we offer? If anything, do we support these in the mobility space?” And a lot of the reasons behind the requests are to move back to aging parents. I’m sure that’s something you’ve seen a lot Greg, in your world too, about trends across the globe and where we’re seeking certain connections?

Greg: Yeah, I’ll jump on that real fast. One of my favorite stats (All Purpose for Americans) is that, you know, 80% of Americans live within 18 miles of their mothers. You know, family/kin is very close. Like, we like to think of ourselves as a very hypermobile society that will, we’re gonna pick up. We’re gonna be on the frontier, we’ll be settlers out there and it’s not the case. We’re a very settled society.

And so, yeah, it’s not surprising that, as we see the silver tsunami get more silvery, as the boomers keep aging, that sandwich generation is going to ask for moves to get back to people. And we saw during again, the pandemic hovers over everything for at least for me, that way we see all these trends extend through it. And one of those was really the failure of senior care as we knew it. It really underscored the disastrous health outcomes for that. So, I think there’s gonna be a big rise in intergenerational living, which is exactly again, brings back to people. what they liked about hybrid was how hybrid was having that personal, human flexibility to deal with children and family and that sandwich generation tasks and yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how that gets codified as support for, “Okay, so you’re moving back for your mother. Now let’s talk about how we can support you in this one.” And that could be a huge draw for companies.

Matt: But it’s interesting Greg in hearing that, because it comes back to the core question of the purpose of mobility, and the companies that view it as a logistical function. They’re not going to be as supportive of instances like this where an employee needs to move, whereas, if they’re thinking about it as an enabler of talent management, now it’s, “Well, here’s a benefit I can provide to my staff to help make sure that I keep my good talent and to make sure that people are feeling supported by the company”. That’s going to give them their best, you know, the best work and allow them to continue to progress their careers and really provide benefit to the company. So, a lot of it comes down to how a given client thinks about mobility with relation to their workforce. And unfortunately, not all of them view it as talent management. They view it as point A to point B, and logistics, and operations.

Greg: You’re so right, Matt, and that’s sort of funny, because this also fits into this whole larger discussion here about the rise of chief experience officers. And there’s a whole rethinking of, how do you manage talent? Like, there’s obviously chief HR officers now, but how do you more broaden that to encompass mobility to encompass workplace functions? Like this, total support around your talent? And how do you enable that? I think companies are finally getting the memo, because you’re seeing all these new listings appearing and reorganizations of firms to move this away from cost centers and pure logistics stuff to this is a core skill set of the company to maintain its talent. And so how do we recognize that?

Kristi: Yeah, and for mobility managers who are listening today, we are even seeing companies who are saying now, in order to get the right talent to the right places, they’re having to offer support in terms of bringing the aging parents with the employee on assignment as a support piece. So that is becoming more common in this generation, and you may see those requests come up from time to time.

All right, so switching gears that we could move more towards technology as of course, I know this is a bit of AI too, but Matt, I was curious, in today’s world and environment, from a client’s perspective, what are the latest tech advancements that are transforming corporate relocation today?

Matt: I mean, certainly we’ve talked about AI and the thing is, a lot of AI, when you look at what mobility companies are offering, for the most part, the customer, the transferee, is chat bot. And it’s not probably as progressive as a lot of other industries are embracing AI versus using AI on the back end to improve operations, to prove to improve internal functions. That’s where we’re seeing a lot of AI, at least at this point in time, from a client perspective, or the company certainly, getting that single view of a move, of a transferee, of their costs. Because there’s a lot of different vendors that support a given move, whether it be immigration or taxes or the core RMC like Cartus. So, it can be really difficult for a large company to have that singular view. So, there’s a lot of effort, particularly from Cartus’ perspective, being put into how we can provide that reporting and that visualization of what those costs are.

Ultimately, though it’s interesting. This is a really interesting industry, because we’re somewhat limited by the demographics of the people being moved, and so we can only get so far ahead of the curve versus a client or a transferee not necessarily being comfortable, because at the end of the day, if you’re on a move, and something goes wrong. You know, your cargo container falls off the ship, or you’re locked out of your temporary living. You want to pick up the phone and call somebody. And no matter how much technology is at your fingertips, you want that reassurance that there’s a human at the other end helping you. And so, no matter how progressive we want to be, we have to go at the pace that our clients and our transferees are willing to move.

Now that said that the demographics of you know the different generations and who’s being moved and who’s moving up the corporate ladder. Obviously, you’re getting to a generations that are much more comfortable with tech, much more comfortable doing everything through their mobile, through their phone. But we aren’t necessarily there yet at all of the executive levels. So, it’s a balance. So, kind of a long-winded answer Kristi that there’s a lot of things we’re doing to improve technology, but it’s not necessarily the same pace that advancements are happening, because we need to stay at the level that our clients and our transfers are comfortable with.

Kristi: Absolutely and I know we have to strike a balance in our industry. We’ve had clients who will say, “Please, don’t use AI for our program”, right? So, we’re kind of stuck in this interim at the moment, seeing, waiting, and seeing what the industry will move to and what AI will look like in five years.

Greg: Well, I say to jump on that trend. What will AI look like in five years? Because one of the whole discussions is around the whole rise of agents, which I’m sure listeners are familiar with now. This is the idea of building semi-autonomous AI chat bots that have an ability to remember, reflect upon what they’ve learned, think, and then ultimately act on their own. And I think, from an intermediate term perspective, it’s really fascinating, because it’s a totally different model, potentially, of sort of than what we have now with the web, where there’s, you search, and there’s ad tech and upcoming listings, and you figure it out if you’re a consumer. But with agents, it’s the idea of you could lay out criteria, and then the agent goes out there and interfaces through various APIs that companies like Anthropic and others are building and talk to other agents and start sorting things, these things for you.

And so, it raises an idea of totally different workflows, like handling out some of these issues and being able to ask these questions about. And listeners may remember here that professionally, my interest in this field is really about what cities can do to attract talent and workers and thinking about these issues. And then personally, I emigrated from Canada and had to really wade through the moat individually of all these kinds of mobility moves. And yeah, it would be fascinating to have a consumer-focused version of this that could really, their agents could help handle some of these issues and deal with this. And so, I’m very curious about see what the agentic revolution turns out, where, you know, where you have millions of conversations are happening between AIS as they are brokering this for us. And how does that actually smoothen these moves? How does it change the whole UX, the experience, etc.?

Matt: I think too Greg, to that point, one of the things that’s talked about as AI in the future, at least I haven’t necessarily seen, is there yet, is the concept of empathy such that you can operationally, have an agent that might be able to answer all the questions. But again, when something’s going wrong in a move, sometimes you just need that ear. You need that empathetic response that certainly the consultant, the human consultant, can give right now, but I don’t know that AI is necessarily there yet to pick up on those cues or to be able to respond in an appropriate fashion. I think that’s what will be really interesting to see how that evolves over the next just even couple years, given the rate of advancement within AI. We’ve built this miracle technology that only half works right half the time. So, let’s not overplay the advances of AI here. But it will be interesting to see if we can work the bugs out, or if the bugs are, in fact, features. Who knows, right?

Kristi: We’ve all had that experience where we’re on a chat box. I was just chatting with my bank the other day, had to reword the same question three times, and that is so frustrating, right? So, we have a long way to go in that realm, but interesting to see where we’ll be headed. All right, changing gears a little bit. Last time, Greg, we talked about generations, and I believe, if I remember correctly, and we were talking about new generations entering the workforce, and how excited they are to be in the office, and they’re seeking out those opportunities. So, I was curious of relating this to mobility. Matt, are you seeing that certain generations right now are responding to different types of relocation incentives and benefits, such as remote work options or the opportunity to be in the office, health benefits? What are you hearing our clients talking about anything in this realm?

Matt: It’s really hard to answer this without generalizing and stereotyping, because certainly, I mean, the different generations have the stereotypes that are associated with them. But I’ll give one example that I think is appropriate. You know that the millennials, the gen z’s, the gen alphas, certainly seem to be a lot more environmentally conscious than perhaps some of the generations of the past. And so thinking about the benefits that are offered to them, we’re seeing more requests around, not necessarily, moving everybody’s household goods, putting them in a big shipping container, getting all the emissions associated with that, versus let’s just rent or buy furniture in the in the destination location, and then we can donate that at the end of the assignment.

So, looking at ways to be more environmentally friendly with the benefits that are offered. And then you also have the dual benefit, and that clients themselves, companies are making their own commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and they achieve that through partners like Cartus and like others, so it benefits them as well at a client perspective, as well as the individual transferees. But that’s an example and then going back to we were talking about technology a moment ago, I mean, certainly there’s more comfort with self-serve. There’s more comfort with I just want to do things myself and certainly more comfort with the concept of flexible benefits, or core/flex, where things like immigration are mandated, but then you can pick and choose the benefits that are most appropriate for you. Certainly, there’s a lot of interest in that as well, such that then what’s offered is appropriate to a given situation, versus everybody gets the same cargo container, the same flights home. That it really allows companies to personalize the benefits and make them appropriate to a given situation.

Greg: It’s interesting. I totally agree with Matt, by the way, that this is like we can only indulge in the grossest generalizations. It is funny to me that, by the way, that you know, the young people have been entitled and terrible since at least gen X 35 years ago. I love how that gets recycled for every generation coming along. I guess we can’t have this conversation without thinking about the financial and life strains under which each generation is under. The boomers are retiring, they are obviously dealing with inheritance issues, estate planning, figuring out what the rest of their lives look like, particularly as they live longer. So, they are under strain to not really divest to their children. But then I think about gen Xers and millennials, who I wrote a whole report about, where millennials are trying to move to raise their families.

There are reports coming out now about [how] we’ve had three years of inflation since you last had me on. It’s been tamped down but psychologically debilitating. Inflation is much more even than wage growth. So yeah, so people have seen with the tariffs, which, you know, go on and off, but it has led to higher interest rates. So, mortgage rates have not come down. So again, you have this whole generation of millennials who are stressed out about whether they haven’t bought a home yet, will be able to move up, etc. And then gen z, those poor kids, worried about if they will ever own a home. And I read, I’m reading news reports now about the new American dream, where they are just hoping to have some sort of level of treats for themselves, let alone the assets that we think of as really part of American life progression.

So, in terms of how that plays out, I would think again, going back to our discussion about, you know, seniors and making that part of the package, that’s obviously going to be part of it for Xers and millennials. Xers and millennials, about thinking about this sort of longer, “How do I balance my real-life issues with this and my long-term estate planning stuff?” And then also for gen Zers, you know, again, the AI conversation, I’d be very curious about how this plays out from a precarity standpoint, about will they become more workaholic as they realize like they feel like that ladder is disappearing underneath of them because of large organizations turning to AI to do those kinds of entry level jobs.

Although, conversely, I also wonder that that’s going to reach a limit at some point and they realize they have no experienced talent anymore, after they’ve used all these AI tools and the AI tools haven’t kept up, then will there be a race to actually have that last sliver of really experienced people? Perhaps that will be the next “great resignation”. We’ll see. But it’ll be curious to see how these play out. But yeah, there’s a lot of despair. The younger you get there because of these various pressures. And as an urbanist, to me, it all comes back to housing. And I think you see this, what a lot of remote work was about is like, how do I move to markets with cheaper housing costs and better quality of life? And I think the more organizations can do to follow those trends or enable that for them, the more they’re going to find a receptive audience from their workers.

Kristi: Absolutely. I mean, that leads exactly into my next question for you, Greg is, even if we’re not looking at generations as a whole, we’re no longer in the “great resignation” as we were three years ago, right? So how have you seen companies adapting their recruitment processes to attract and engage the right talent? Have you seen any changes? Is it more of a company’s industry than a worker’s industry? Right?

Greg: Yeah. I mean, certainly the pendulum swung back. I mean, again, the darkest version of this one. I was actually on a call with a developer was launching a company called Agent Ops that was following how agents were working. And he had this conspiracy theory, which is probably true, is that at any company that has a lot of remote workers, they’re going to start basically capturing the keystrokes and work of those workers and use them to build their own versions of agents. You know, today it’s the CEOs making avatars themselves. Companies that, of course, have the legal right to use employee output and input in their course of their work, will start to use this to figure out how their employees are actually doing their jobs and how the organizations work, and start cloning that. So, there will be a lot of that happening. And man, that gets crazy. I know of a company that cloned a now deceased employee, and they effectively owned that clone of them. I mean, that’s wild to me, and I expect that we might see that in parts of negotiations, perhaps you sign a future contract, and you’re agreeing, this is how your data will be used. You’re signing a terms and condition. And maybe you lease former data, you bring in your own emails and your past performance data, and say, “Here you go”. You know, obviously it’ll be a lot of future work in law, I think, around this area, but beyond that, I’m very curious to see just how those conversations go, because I’ve been too long of a free agent myself to participate in that. I imagine organizations realize they now have the upper hand, particularly with the advent of AI tools and other digital tools that can do this, do this kind of work at sophisticated levels. So, I don’t know, be curious to see if employers overplay their hand with AI the same way workers overplayed their hands with remote work and the “great resignation”.

Matt: I’ll just build on that too, Greg, with particularly entry level jobs. And there’s been a lot about that recently where McKinsey and others are roles that the entry level MBA used to do in creating decks. That’s all being done in an automated fashion now. And so, this has been one of the worst times for new college grads to enter into the workplace. And one of the reasons for that is because of AI being able to do some of these more entry level roles. So, to your point, just really interesting how that continues to go. Because obviously, there’s a difference between an entry level role versus one that requires 20 years of experience. But you know, will AI continue to get more advanced and more sophisticated that it can do more of those advanced functions within a company? It’ll be interesting to see how that goes.

Kristi: I’d be curious if we’d see more entry level relocations than Matt. If, in case, it’s harder to find a role for entry level employees, are they going to be more willing to move, truly, anywhere, to just start their career? So, we’ll have to watch that trend.

Greg: Well, that’ll happen. We’re seeing that. I mean, I think European firms know this quite well, in the sense of so much young talent in Britain, for example, all ended up in the Gulf. I mean, we’ve seen, I know Italians, there’s still huge outflows of young Italians to other nations in the EU zone, and, of course, the Gulf as well. And, yeah, there’s been a lot of speculation about whether we would see the same thing in the United States, and to lesser extent, Canada. I mean, Canada has long had an outflow to the States of young workers. So yeah, we know we’ve I think there’s an assumption here that you can find a job in your home market, if you’re in a big city, or you’ll move to New York to get started as a job. I mean, that’s what I did when I was young. But I think we’re actually could be on the cusp of seeing a lot of young Americans be either put their hand up to be relocated to those markets, or search out opportunities wherever they are, or simply go pursue those firms in what? We think maybe not China, but certainly in the Gulf and perhaps in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, in a way that they haven’t before.

Kristi: I think we’ll also see an interesting trend of specific countries where more relocations will be occurring because of the aging workforce, and the population isn’t big enough to be replacing those roles, even with AI taking some of those roles. So, for example, I know Canada and Japan have both voiced, “We don’t have enough of a population to sustain ourselves going forward”. So, I would not be shocked if we see more relocations to both of those countries in the next decade or two.

Greg: Such a hardship relocating to Japan, you know. Shudder the thought.

Kristi: Right! So that actually is the perfect segue. I would love to know both of your thoughts on what you think the future of work or global mobility will look like in five to 10 years’ time?

Greg: Can I punt that one to Matt first?

Matt: I think I mean from just with my global mobility hat on, I think we’re already starting to see some of the trends that shift away from the traditional expat assignment into much more, whether it be business travel, short-term assignments, one-way assignments, it’s really how you define mobility. And I think that a lot of RMCs are structured around defining it as the expat assignment, with all the suppliers and vendors to make that happen. And I think the more that we’re equipped to support whatever the nature of a move of somebody is certainly the better we’ll be as a company, and the more that will support the clients to allow them the flexibility that they need.

Because back to a comment that I made earlier, Kristi, what I really hope to see is a continued focus, and, in fact, an increased focus on ROI of mobility, of mobility as talent management. That’s what, what I want to see over the next several years is that it really is an enabler to companies being more successful by having the right talent in the right place at the right time, under whatever circumstances that may be, and all of that enabled by technology. So that’s, I mean, you know, kind of a general answer, but I think that’s the vision of where we want to go. Because no matter how much, how good remote work gets, and until we start getting to teleportation, there’s always going to be that need to have certain people with certain sets of skills in certain locations that can’t be done by somebody who’s local there. And so, the more that we can enable that to happen again, the more successful that companies will be.

Greg: I’m with Matt on this one. I hope you’re right, absolutely, that it’s, human-centered with augmented by technology, because, you know, you flip it around to the opposite, which is large scale endorsement of AI. And also, just to do a dark version of this, because the future work in five to 10 years, what are we talking about in terms of work and where? There’s one version of this where, given geopolitical trends in the States, for a moment, I think the future work should be focused on care. I think it should be as human as possible. And we should be focusing on, maximizing the human but a lot of those roles in personal care and in nursing care, and these kinds of things for our demographic challenges are often done by people from other nations. And so, the immigration mood plays out. Japan before it embraced immigration in a way that it had not for decades, was really, they’re the ones who gave us this idea of robots caring for elderly people. They were thinking about how automation would play this out. So, I really think that we embrace the human, we enable humans, and not just pursue this idea of robots will be good enough, because there is a whole trend right now of humanoid robots. Tesla is doing this with Optimus and others. So, you know, there is this whole idea of, we got rid of the humans and replaced it with robots, and things are almost as good. I would like to think that we are going to create a future work that is more place-based, that is more personal there, that is more that’s global, and then very local at the same time, as opposed to the sort of big regional commutes that we’ve been doing, and large scale.

But it’s gonna depend a lot on structural changes too, in terms of, we need to make housing more affordable for people. We need to be able to give them more choice in terms of locations, because we’ve been solely taking it away through high costs there. So, you know, I don’t know. We’ll see how it plays out. But, you know, I guess if I have to make a prediction, I do think I’m in the camp of those, that there will be at least $1 billion company with a single employee who figures out some way to build these kinds of automated work chains and pull something together and is able to skim enough. And it’s gonna be very interesting to see the rise of these, you know, frontier firms or others, how that plays out. Talent should be at the center. People should be at the center of this, and we should be augmenting them.

Kristi: People are always at the heart of what we do. So go ahead, Matt.

Matt: I was just gonna say, I mean, particularly with regards to robots. You know, the company that was trying to make the fully automated robot pizza assembly didn’t work. So, if we can’t get pizzas, I think we’re still a little way off from getting to the full humanoid of taking care of elderly.

Greg: I mean, yeah, making pizza is the highest calling of humanity, frankly. So yes, let’s keep it focused on that.

Kristi: And Greg, not to put you on the spot, but as an urbanist, I am curious what you think the most attractive cities will be to relocate to in the next five to 10 years?

Greg: So, I will have, well, I think it will be the same ones as today. And I think there’s a particularly prescient essay by Joel Guerrero, who wrote Edge City. So, he wrote the book about really, like, the big suburban office parks of the 80s. You know, how that was enabled by the car and PCs. And then 15 years ago, he wrote a whole essay about imagining the future of remote work before it really caught on. And his primary city was Santa Fe, New Mexico: small, walkable, urbane, also punishing, expensive to live there. So, there’s that, but has its own Opera House. And then the other examples were college towns. And if you look at Pew surveys and others like Ann Arbor is the American dream, Ann Arbor also has a punishing, expensive housing market there too. So, it is people. Americans don’t want suburbs, per se. They don’t want big cities. They want Mean Streets, and they want the freedom to drive, but they also want to be around other people that when if we can build more places like that, and we are.

These are the kinds of places you’re seeing in McKinney, Texas and out in the sprawl. But people want those kinds of places, and I think those will be the hot markets of the future, as people want walkability, but they want it out in a place they can afford, or they have that freedom of movement as well, so that’d be my bets.

Kristi: Alight, thank you both so much for joining us today, and thank you listeners for standing with us. If you have any questions or ideas for future podcasts, please don’t hesitate to reach out. You can email us at cartussolutions@cartus.com or on LinkedIn, we’d be happy to hear from you. Alright, see you next time.