LifeFactFuture represented at WORK2025, 20–22 August 2025, Turku

WORK2025 is the seventh international multidisciplinary WORK conference on work and working life research organised by the Turku Centre for Labour Studies TCLS, University of Turku. The hybrid conference has its onsite presence at the University of Turku campus area, drawing hundreds of participants from Finland and abroad.

Mikkel Knudsen from the Finland Futures Research Centre’s LFF team gave a presentation on the networked factory of the future at the conference. The presentation discussed how digitalisation is changing the role of blue-collar workers in pharmaceutical manufacturing. Knudsen’s key message – based on conducted focus-group interviews with companies in the sector – was that companies perceive an ongoing shift in the requirement for work roles, and that AI and digitalisation causes a need for upskilling the workforce. There is a sense of industry uncertainty about how to best conduct this upskilling, but there are also intriguing signs of experimentation with various initiatives supporting the transformation of role requirements.

WP1 researcher Mikkel Knudsen presenting at WORK2025.

In general, LifeFactFuture had a strong presence at the conference. Leader of LFFs WP3, Tuomas Mäkilä from Department of Computing, UTU, chaired the Digitalisation, AI and Robotics track, in which Knudsen delivered his presentation. Based on the conference presentations, Mäkilä says that it is clear that generative AI in particular will have a significant impact on working life in the near future, although the exact nature of this impact is still unclear. Additionally, traditional digitalisation is still ongoing in many industries.

WP3 leader Tuomas Mäkilä chairing the track on Digitalisation, AI and Robotics.