How To Make AI Work With You, Not For You Or Instead Of You
An Article NOT Written by ChatGPT
AI and work. The topic on everyone’s minds right now.
From those who are excited about the new possibilities it holds for productivity, to those who are terrified they may be out of a job – it’s hard to find professionals with a neutral view.
As an employer, how can you make AI work with you, and as an employee, how can you ensure it doesn’t take your place? Well, we’ve been scouring the net to answer those questions, and we’ve got some tips and some nuggets of advice for you to take into this new reality with you.
Because, as many a commentator has said, the Genie is out of the bottle – and it’s not going back in.
AI And The Error Of Replacement
We’re hearing a lot right now about layoffs, real and imagined, due to AI and machine learning technology that can do certain jobs. We can’t deny that this will happen, and that it already is happening – Goldman Sachs have reported that 300 million jobs may be replaced or diminished.
The bit that often gets left out of this scare-mongering type of headline is the big IF – if generative AI lives up to the current hype.
The risk is that before we know if it will live up to the hype, employers will replace their workers anyway. We can’t help but predict a coming cycle: employers who have laid off employees too soon needing to rehire when it turns out that the miracle tech that could replace their people – actually couldn’t.
Our advice to management and HR professionals – don’t throw your people away just yet.
For one thing, the cost to rehire them if needed will be astronomical. Recruitment and training can cost business up to £30,000 – per hire. Additionally, the damage to your employer brand and your business itself may be irreparable, just take the ongoing drama at Twitter as an example.
Another idea, consider AI and machine learning tools as generalists. Sure, they can do “anything” you ask them to, but they’re not specialists with experience and expertise in your specific area.
A better long-term plan would be to upskill your specialists in AI and machine learning capabilities.
A shiny new tool without someone who knows how to use it in the correct way for your business is a shiny new tool that won’t do you much good.
From an employee perspective, chances are AI’s capabilities WILL make the job market more competitive. As above, specialist capabilities will keep you desirable, and training yourself in AI and machine learning to support your skills will ensure that you stand out in a context where recruiters are excited about the new world opening up.
So What CAN AI Do For You?
From a recruitment perspective, HR professionals are excited about the potential of generative AI and language models in terms of talent acquisition. AI models can make the process less labour intensive and more efficient by creating more accurate job postings and screening applicants to identify promising candidates.
While the biases of AI models have been much discussed, and need to be monitored with caution, AI tech can also offer interesting ways to check human biases. Such as the platform Pymetrics, which uses AI in candidate assessment tools which measure actual skill demonstration.
The platform also redirects “silver medallist” candidates to other fitting job opportunities, showing the tech’s capabilities on ensuring interesting candidates aren’t missed and the right talent is tapped, saving recruiters time in the process by automatically re-engaging those promising applicants.
One compelling use of AI in the workplace is to make workers lives easier in terms of labour-intensive tasks with little productivity outcome, like admin and ‘busywork’.
In an ideal world, time freed up by less administrative work will allow managers and team members to upskill in ways that will benefit overall business.
In the same way that word processing tech on computers made our lives a lot easier in comparison to the typewriter, which incidentally did the same thing for manual note taking, AI tech currently being tested to generate meeting summaries from Teams calls offers to change our workload for the better.
In a less ideal world, of course, businesses could use this kind of tech to cut costs by cutting jobs.
What About Creativity & Job Satisfaction?
Finally, just because AI can do a job for you, doesn’t mean it should. An interesting take from McKinsey recruitment professionals helps us to take a different view on the tech’s capabilities, rather than the overarching excitement of the moment that focuses on productivity alone.
They posit that AI may make us all less interesting. While output may go up, the flipside of this is that creativity goes down – and it’s a compelling argument.
By changing the way that certain content is created, such as articles like this one, the person “creating” the article is getting more content for their time but thinking less.
Ideas that would come to you during the creating process simply no longer come to anyone – think about the lost creativity, the ideas that could have been.
From a management and recruitment perspective, we need to think about what actually makes our companies tick. While AI can get it done, unlike your employees, it won’t learn from or be inspired by the process of doing a task – it does what you tell it. Inspired and creative people will always be the backbone of inspiring and creative businesses.
What Kind Of Future Do We Want?
The letter written by the Future of Life Institute opposing widespread use of AI opened up the question of what kind of future of work do we want when they asked:
Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones?
We need to learn to work with AI, without forgetting that people are the backbone of a business.
To evolve in this new context we need to figure out ways in which the tech can help people become better assets to your company - rather than trying to figure out how the tech can become better versions of them.
Be Brave
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