Roundtable: AI Readiness Starts at Age Zero: Why the Future Workforce Depends on How We Parent Today

Roundtables are topic-led, small-group discussions hosted by our Leads, offering an intimate, peer-to-peer space where participants of all levels — including beginners — can engage, learn, and exchange ideas more directly.

Two questions. Two disciplines. One problem nobody is joining up.

The futurist asks: Organisations are spending billions on an AI economy based on our world as we see it today, but which human capabilities will we actually reward in the future workplace, and what will be needed from younger generations?

The child development expert asks: AI tools promise convenience for time-poor families and higher academic outcomes, but what happens when they replace the very interactions that build the human skills children desperately need for the future: critical thinking, creativity, empathy, and resilience?

This roundtable is where those questions collide.

Futurist Athena Peppes brings the future of work lens: the cost of the AI readiness gap, the capabilities that will define human value, and the case for treating childhood as economic infrastructure.

Parenting expert Anita Cleare brings the developmental evidence: how those capabilities actually form, what AI in childhood does to cognitive and social foundations, and what the research tells us about the real impact on the next generation.