The third edition of the Future of Work Africa Forum held in Casablanca gathered HR directors, corporate decision-makers, academics, and students. The event’s central diagnostic was blunt: organizations are broadly underprepared for the transformation ahead, and the human dimension of that transformation — talent, leadership, and organizational culture — is lagging further behind than the technology itself.
Samuel Durand, a speaker and documentary filmmaker specializing in the future of work, set the tone by observing that “on the whole, we are poorly prepared for AI.” His argument was nuanced: artificial intelligence will optimize time, but the deeper challenge is that workers need to be repositioned — not retrained in a narrow technical sense, but fundamentally reoriented toward the value that human presence adds to an AI-augmented environment. The real foundation, multiple speakers agreed, is education before training, and the capacity for meaning-making and adaptability before the acquisition of specific tools.
Abdou Diop, of Forvis Mazars, counselled the audience against imposing AI adoption mechanisms from above, arguing for balance: companies need a clear approach to what AI will add in performance terms, but that approach must leave space for organic adoption and must be alert to resistance as a signal rather than an obstacle. Rosa Canadas, president of Talea Capital Corporate Finance, pushed further, arguing that capital flows are “not sufficiently directed toward the transformation of talent,” and offering a striking inversion of the prevailing narrative: “Africans have a greater capacity to resist uncertainty than Europeans. And Europe must come to look for talent at this level.”
Employment Minister Younes Sekkouri, speaking at the forum, connected the institutional dimension to the personal. Leadership, in his framing, is not a function but a posture — acquired through early habits, stress management, availability to one’s environment, and the capacity to absorb negative energy without being consumed by it. His appearance signaled the government’s active engagement with the future-of-work agenda rather than mere observation.
Jawad Ziyat, President of Raja Club Athletic, brought a sports leadership perspective, arguing that those who have worked on their own transformation are those who combine talent with perseverance and an attitude of genuine openness.
The event’s generational dimension was recurring and pointed. Generation Z no longer carries the same expectations as its predecessors: compensation alone is insufficient. The retention of young talent requires an environment characterized by agility, flexibility, and distributed leadership — a management philosophy that many Moroccan and African organizations are still building the cultural infrastructure to deliver. The forum positions itself as the annual barometer of this evolution, combining diagnosis, debate, and the kind of frank acknowledgement that transformation is harder than strategy suggests.