Microsoft Research has released a podcast episode featuring Jaime Teevan, Chief Scientist and Technical Fellow, in conversation with three researchers behind the New Future of Work Report 2025: Jenna Butler, Principal Applied Research Scientist; Jake Hofman, Senior Principal Researcher; and Rebecca Janssen, Senior Applied Scientist. The episode is part of the Ideas series. According to the episode description, the conversation covers AI adoption, AI’s impact on work, the intentionality required to create a future where people flourish, and whether AI is better understood as a tool or a collaborator.
The New Future of Work initiative has been running since 2020, when Microsoft researchers came together to assess the pandemic’s impact on work practices. The first report was published in 2021, and the effort has continued annually since. The 2025 report involved over 50 authors from across Microsoft and external institutions worldwide.
How the researchers describe the report and its purpose
Jenna Butler, who has been involved since the report began, frames its purpose as giving people agency in a moment when technology feels like something happening to them. “With any technology we introduce to society, that’s a sociotechnical shift,” she says in the episode. “How people perceive it, use it, what they want to do with it, what they’re willing to pay for — all these things matter.” The report, she describes, aims to make visible what current research shows, and to help people understand how their own behaviors and views are shaping the technology.
Butler’s research background is in software engineering productivity and AI’s impact on that domain. She notes that her original training was in bioinformatics and cancer research.
Jake Hofman’s work is focused on AI and cognition at Microsoft Research New York City. He co-leads a workstream called Thinking and Learning with AI, or TALA, with researcher Richard Banks, and joined as a section editor for the 2025 report. “I know how widely read and impactful the report is,” he says, describing the opportunity to present research from Microsoft and beyond with a coherent viewpoint.
Rebecca Janssen joined Microsoft full time in October 2024, having followed the New Future of Work reports from outside the organization during her PhD, where she studied AI’s impacts on work and society from an economics perspective.
The core tension: efficiency versus the future worth wanting
Hofman draws a distinction at the center of the episode. “It’s easy to say boost efficiency, but that’s not actually the future we want to live in,” he says. That statement is not anti-AI — it is a pushback against treating adoption rate and speed as the primary metrics for success.
Jenna Butler reinforces the intentionality theme. “The future of work is actively being built by us, by consumers,” she says in the episode — a framing presented as a corrective to both techno-pessimist and techno-optimist positions.
Benchmarking against the past as a mistake
Rebecca Janssen introduces a critique of how AI capabilities are currently evaluated: “We keep benchmarking against the past…this is a mistake or maybe only the first step.” The argument, as she frames it, is that measuring AI by its ability to replicate existing human work sets the ceiling too low. The more significant question is what kinds of work become possible that were not feasible before.
Teevan describes the current moment as “a really big shift in how digital technology can support people getting things done.”
The episode raises the tool-versus-collaborator question explicitly. The framing is treated in the discussion as consequential rather than semantic: how AI is positioned shapes the expectations, trust calibration, and accountability structures that people bring to their interactions with it.