There is numerous speak about how generative artificial intelligence is popping our working lives the wrong way up – from the power to automate mundane on a regular basis tasks to the creation of personalized avatars to take our place in meetings.
But how well does the common employee already know in regards to the opportunities and risks for his profession and the way can he benefit from rapidly evolving technology?
This query inspired the Financial Times podcast to provide a practical three-part mini-series on AI within the workplace: what it could do, what it could't do – and what might occur in the longer term.
The podcast host and producer have summarized their findings in five top takeaways. Listen to your entire series Hereor wherever you get your audio from.
1. AI helps with succession planning – and profession advancement
Everyone knows that generative AI is trained on the info it receives, and with regards to its use in recruiting, that has its drawbacks. Much attention has been paid to potential biases in hiring and other dire (hopefully unintended) consequences. If the info accommodates human biases, these will translate into potentially discriminatory AI decisions.
But Chano Fernández, co-CEO of Eightfold, a synthetic intelligence-powered talent platform, points out how technology can improve recruiting practices.
“Large (tech) firms typically take into consideration succession planning for his or her top 200 executives,” he says. AI is extending this approach — one might say democratizing it — by suggesting succession plans for lower-ranking employees and helping firms find candidates for vacant positions from a bigger pool.
The software can show open positions to large numbers of individuals – and the trick is that it could also show candidates what key skills they lack for a specific role. That gap could deny staff the job this time, but, says Fernández, the AI ​​helps staff look to the longer term in a more structured way. It will show them the way to acquire the abilities they need for that form of job, but it is going to also show them “different profession paths and different paths they might take as professionals.”
This is useful for firms seeking to hire and encourages employees to be more creative of their profession planning.
2. Fast engineer will likely be a sought-after job
Prompt engineering—the words, queries, and requirements fed into an AI tool to provide the specified result—will likely be the in-demand job of the longer term (so perhaps the humanities aren't for nothing). Generative AI is simply pretty much as good because the instructions humans give it, so we want to develop our communication skills—and it is going to learn with us.
Marcus du Sautoy, Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, tells us how that is shaping up: “I'm not yet particularly good at getting (AI) to go within the direction I need to push it. (But) I see that there are already people who find themselves practically artists of prompting. They almost write poems into AI that… elicit incredible visual or verbal responses.”
Dan Sherratt, vp of creativity and innovation at design agency Poppins, gives a practical example of the fundamentals of prompt engineering: “It's still a pc. It still responds to commands. And that's mainly still the case once you break it all the way down to its simplest form: ones and zeros. You have to offer it commands to get the best answers. For example, you might specifically ask it to create a photograph taken with a certain camera at a certain time of day on a certain form of film. So recreating images is far more impressive than simply using it as a search engine for stock photos.”
Rapid engineering requires a skill—not only writing instructions—and firms increasingly must hire people who find themselves good at it.
3. AI is already taking away our jobs – but not the great ones
When we asked our podcast guests whether AI models are doing their jobs for them, they said broadly the identical thing: AI is (or will soon be) taking away a few of their work. But it shouldn’t be taking away the parts which are necessarily essential to them. This reminds us of the most effective practice of “Job crafting”where employees are allowed to offer up the parts of their job they don't like in an effort to give more meaning and purpose to the parts they care about. In the past, this probably meant putting an unhappy colleague in command of your boring data entry or administrative tasks. Now, generative AI can take over.
To reduce her time burden, Iliana Oris Valiente, a frontrunner at Accenture Canada, turns to her “digital twin,” Laila. Laila has spent years training on Accenture case studies and research reports, and “can and can” attend meetings in Valiente's place regardless of what. That means tasks get done faster because Valiente is free — and she will avoid repetitive conversations about previous projects. “Once you've had (that conversation) 15 times, it's really not that interesting anymore,” she says.
The podcast team's larger query revolves around whether it's smart at hand more work over to digital assistants and AI on the whole. We asked Madhumita Murgia, the FT's AI editor and writer of , to offer us her view on what technology can – and may't – do for us at work. There are two features to this: First, the human one. We won’t feel comfortable having an avatar come to our meetings. And what does it say to the team if a manager simply never shows up in person? A digital twin may even appear like the boss – Laila looks like Iliana, for instance – but perhaps that makes things even weirder?
And, more importantly, AI is just… As Murgia says, “I believe we want to vary our behavior loads more to get these twins or assistants to do our jobs, because they're not entirely accurate. They're stuffed with errors. That's actually the way in which generative AI systems behave. They make things up.
“So after we say, 'Is it OK for a digital twin to take notes in a very important meeting where I even have to do something?', that's an enormous step from a human perspective. I'm not convinced that we're all going to only shrug off responsibility for that.”
4. Human-made creative work will likely be a high-status luxury product
We're often glad to pay more for a coffee from a classy shop where the barista creates his own pattern in the froth, slightly than choosing a (barely) cheaper drink that comes out on the push of a button. This analogy will help explain the potential way forward for creative work. We pay more for the prestige and superiority of something made by hand (or on this case, brainwork).
In terms of jobs, which means that individual, high-quality creative work in industries reminiscent of design and marketing is unlikely to get replaced by AI anytime soon.
Dan Sherratt says his company uses AI “almost exclusively within the pitch and proposal process” and doesn't use it within the actual execution of creative work. “It's really, really good for conceptual work, but it surely's not quite pretty much as good at producing finished files as you'd expect.”
He notes that “things made with harder work (in industries like fashion) (already) have a better value attached to them… You're buying a bespoke pair of shoes from an Italian shoemaker whose family business is tons of of years old, versus a mass-produced sneaker from a sweatshop that has no intrinsic value or history. So creatively, that is perhaps the direction we're heading in.”
5. AI will help introverts shine
The use of AI in recruitment is already relatively widespread. There are tools that, for instance, screen applications and help candidates write resumes. Ali Ansari, founding father of recruitment service micro1, goes a step further and offers an avatar interviewer in his AI-based system for software developers. He says this could be particularly useful for introverts and folks with neurodiverse conditions reminiscent of autism, who can find face-to-face interviews (whether online or in person) intimidating.
Does an avatar break the strain? Yes, says Ansari. “We saw numerous comments about that, candidates mainly saying, 'I'm an introvert and that was really great. I could talk in regards to the architecture of a backend system or the design of a frontend system without being nervous about talking to a different human being.'”
He says this sort of digital interview can improve the experience for candidates and “ultimately be significantly better than a technical interview with a human.”
As recent generations who spent their childhoods playing games enter the workforce, using avatar interviewers may seem to be a natural progression.
