My Sixth Point on AI for 2023 - AI & Workforce
Earlier this year, I posted my five answers to a question I was asked on cable news about what’s going on with AI this year. In case you were living under a rock in January, you can find the post here. I’d like to add a sixth point today. AI and the workforce.
I’m not referring to the upskilling of our current workforce on AI topics nor the continued education of top AI professionals at our universities, though both are extremely important. I’m talking about AI’s impact on our workforce. Perhaps owing to the rapid release of large language models (LLMs) this year, I’ve heard some rumblings about how LLMs and other forms of AI will impact workers across industries. Will GPT4 replace coders? Will AI eliminate the need for customer service jobs? What is really going on here?!?!? Rest easy, friends. Read on.
Administrative Burdens: Every job has aspects that no one likes. Mostly it’s just simple paperwork, maybe records management, maybe (no, definitely) it’s travel vouchers. Whatever it is, we all encounter this kind of sludge in our work. We accept this as reality, but every time we are pulled off a task for something like this, we are pulled away from being experts in our field. The first place we will see this play out is in the AUGMENTATION of the workforce by removing administrative burdens. This will improve efficiency and value creation across organizations by letting talent flourish and remove the sludge.
Better Decision Making: I know, I know, you are an eminent expert, and you know your field better than anyone else. But hey, we could all use a hand, right? Another opportunity for augmentation is in the improvement of data used by humans to make decisions. Notice I did not say the AI is making the decisions. AI can process mountains of data and provide a simple visualization of critical points that human decision makers can use to inform their decisions. Again, more efficiency, more value creation, allowing the experts to be experts and not wasting their time on administrative functions, managing spreadsheets.
Time Reduction: Finally, AI, particularly generative AI, will reduce the time it takes to create products by doing the initial heavy lifting to be followed by a human who refines the output. We should all check to verify the ChatGPT output we get for anything we ask it for. You might ask it to generate an opening paragraph to get you started on a product or you might ask it to create some code for you. Even if the output isn’t perfect, it is a start and it will reduce the time you and your people spend on creating products.
As AI flies off the shelves and tech podcasters struggle to keep up, remember...augmentation & automation of the stupid. The workforce conversation is likely to continue but if it is allowed to be controlled by those who claim AI is coming for our jobs, that will define the industry for years to come. That doesn’t have to be the case. Let’s start talking augmentation when we talk about workforce and talk about opportunities to let our human experts be experts and not caught in sludge.