TALK · WORKSHOP · RELAZIONEXPO 2026
Taking the Job Apart
People and artificial intelligence at work. What remains for people when AI enters the workplace?
ROLE
Design and facilitation
PARTICIPANTS
80 students taking part in the programme
PARTNERS
Teach For Italy, JA Italia
DATE AND LOCATION
9 October 2026, Verona
RelazionEXPO 2026
RelazionEXPO brings business, education, culture and society into dialogue to explore how relationships can create value. The 2026 edition, held from 8 to 10 October at the Palazzo della Gran Guardia in Verona, combined talks, workshops and intergenerational conversations. As part of the ‘Listen to Me – Talk to Me’ programme, students and adults explored consciousness, artificial intelligence and relationships between people and technology.
My contribution: Taking the Job Apart
People and artificial intelligence at work
What happens to people’s contribution when artificial intelligence enters the everyday tasks of a profession? As part of the session ‘How to use AI to develop our critical thinking’, I helped co-design the afternoon programme and developed and facilitated ‘Taking the Job Apart’: a workshop in which students did not listen to predictions about the future of work, but analysed it for themselves.
Objective
Move beyond the paralysing question ‘Will artificial intelligence take my job?’ and look concretely at how people’s contribution is changing across different professions.
The aim was not to make a definitive prediction, but to help students observe how jobs are changing with greater awareness and critical thinking.
Activities
01
Five groups took five different professions apart, task by task
02
Reflection began individually, then continued in groups of three and as a whole group
03
Each group distinguished what AI can do, what requires human input and what can emerge from the two working together
04
The reflections were captured on five posters, together with uncertainties and open questions
05
Each group chose a spokesperson and came up with a question or proposal to put to the adults
The plenary discussion
The feedback session did not close the work; it opened it up. The five spokespersons presented what had emerged from their analysis of the professions, highlighting beliefs that had been challenged, unanswered questions and the proposals developed by the groups.
This led to a facilitated conversation between students, adults, teachers and experts. The young people’s questions became a starting point for bringing different perspectives into dialogue and questioning adults’ assumptions too, without looking for simple or definitive answers.
The contributions were brought together in a shared report and fed into the ‘Letter to Adults’, the closing reflection of the afternoon.
From the workshop
Bring Taking the Job Apart to your school
The workshop can be adapted to students’ ages, courses of study, group size and time available.
It does not give young people a ready-made answer about the future of work. It creates the conditions for them to analyse change, compare different perspectives and ask more considered questions about the relationship between people and artificial intelligence.