09-02-2026
The challenges of social disruption that AI innovation pose cannot be solved in silos.
That is the value of the upcoming Cornerstone for Business conference, says Victoria Prowse, a labor economist at the Mitch Daniels School of Business. Conference programming invites attendees to step outside the immediate demands of their particular industries, disciplines or committees and consider how seemingly separate ideas connect.
“Cornerstone for Business is a fantastic conference because the whole program transcends fields, philosophies and perspectives,” Prowse says. “The interactions across industry, education, history, economics, all the different domains — it’s somewhere we can potentially put all that together and come out with a whole different perspective on how the world is looking like right now, where it’s come from, and where it’s going.”
Prowse will bring an economist’s perspective to the conference’s exploration of 250 years of technological disruption. Her work focuses on the labor market at the individual level: the jobs people hold, the education that opens, or limits, opportunities, and the inequalities that emerge in earnings and other labor-market outcomes.
AI is the urgent present-day example. “There is already quite a lot of evidence that it’s having big effects on the labor market,” she says, particularly in specific occupations and among people trying to enter the workforce. In fields such as computer programming, AI apparently has reduced the availability of some roles, with implications that extend beyond a first job to workers’ longer-term careers and life trajectories.
Yet this is not the first time technology has reorganized work. Prowse points to computerization and the internet, which transformed tasks in bookkeeping, secretarial work and publishing, as well as earlier shifts tied to automation, the Industrial Revolution, electricity and the printing press. Looking across those eras does not yield a straightforward prediction for the future with AI. However, it offers evidence for thinking more carefully about how to leverage and respond to new technologies.
One central question is which human capabilities complement AIs — and which tasks it may substitute for. Prowse’s research in the labor market looks at the change in skills. She sees how skills are not single measures of high, medium or low ability, but as “a basket of capabilities that people bring to the world” and the labor market.
Yes, people will still need numeracy and literacy, but the future will likely value “higher-level skills” such as teamwork, creativity, interpersonal ability and theory of mind: the ability to understand other people’s emotions, intentions and beliefs. Those capabilities may become more valuable as AI takes on information gathering and other codifiable parts of work.
“A job that someone does has lots of tasks in it,” Prowse says. “Part of it is going to a meeting and negotiating or talking with your colleagues. Part of it is sitting behind your desk doing admin stuff or doing kind of background research or information gathering.” The more a role consists of tasks AI can replace, the greater the likely near-term disruption. But jobs also may evolve rather than disappear entirely.
That evolution carries a real risk of inequality. One highly productive worker using AI might do work that once required many people, Prowse notes, concentrating rewards among fewer individuals while others lose opportunities. Over the long run, workers may develop different skills and move into emerging occupations. The difficult policy challenge lies in the transition: supporting people whose livelihoods are disrupted now, not simply assuming that future growth will reach them.
Prowse cautions against treating technological progress as the enemy. “Being hostile to a new technology or trying to shut it down and being extremely restrictive in terms of regulation is probably not the best trajectory for a prosperous long-term outcome,” she says. “It’s more a question of managing that process in a way that is more fairly distributed across people who are impacted in the shorter term.”
That work begins with a broader vantage point — and with learning how to apply knowledge in changing circumstances. As a professor, she encourages students to think in terms of “not so much about what can I know, but what can I do?”
The Cornerstone for Business conference, Spirit of 1776: Advancing Opportunity, Innovation, and Free Markets, creates space for exactly this kind of critical, cross-functional thinking: connecting evidence, history and human experience to the decisions that will shape the next era of innovation.
