Knowledge Center

Labor market systems assume that most people have a stable job with an identifiable employer. That relationship supports social insurance, payroll taxes, worker protections, and employment statistics. But work is becoming fragmented, platform-mediated, cross-border, and AI-augmented. As the job becomes a less reliable unit for organizing economic life, the institutions built around it lose their fit. Systems for measuring, protecting, developing, and taxing work are changing more slowly than work itself.

For most of history, work was personal and outcome based, organized around demonstrated capability. Industrialization later standardized it around factories, firms, and fixed working time. That model remains dominant, but work is moving toward a capability economy. The capability economy is an economic model in which value creation is organized around verified human capability, augmented by AI and mediated through data-rich labor market systems, where what a worker can demonstrably do carries more weight than position or tenure.