The challenge

AI and automation cut across traditional boundaries, including departmental boundaries. Conditions and impacts are simultaneously economic, technological, social and institutional: they affect productivity and innovation, but also skills, job quality, health, labour-market transitions and regional inequality. The Pissarides Review found that these issues could not be understood or managed effectively through isolated policy interventions or a single departmental lens.

What the Pissarides Review recommended

The £1.8 million Nuffield Foundation-funded Pissarides Review into the Future of Work and Wellbeing was initiated and hosted by IFOW, with LSE, UCL, Imperial College London and Warwick Business School, with a three-year interdisciplinary research programme led by IFOW Co-Founder Professor Sir Christopher Pissarides.

The Final Report, published in January 2025, called for automation and the future of work to be recognised as a core cross-government policy area. It recommended a dedicated Future of Work Unit at the centre of government, alongside a revitalised dedicated ministerial role for the Future of Work.

The purpose was to create the capacity to improve and integrate policy across AI and innovation, industrial strategy, employment, skills, wellbeing and devolution; build better evidence on technological and labour-market change; and support earlier, more coordinated responses to disruption.

From research to government machinery

In January 2026, the government established a new cross-government AI and the Future of Work Unit. IFOW was invited to support senior DSIT leaders through co-hosted expert roundtables as the work developed, and the former Programme Director of the Pissarides Review Dr Abby Gilbert was appointed to the independent Expert Panel supporting the new unit.

Government has continued to strengthen the centre-of-government architecture around work and AI. In July 2026, it announced a specialist Minister for AI attending Cabinet, supported by new coordinating arrangements at the centre of government, and established a new Minister for the Future of Work. This demonstrates further movement towards the Review’s underlying direction and research findings: dedicated senior political ownership and cross-government coordination for a technological transition is needed to meet new challenges and opportunities.

IFOW is proud to have supported the development of government machinery, recently taken further still through the establishment of a new AI Economics Institute, the first government-backed institute of its kind.