AI and the workplace – one year on
As ChatGPT celebrates its one-year anniversary, looking back, it’s become clear that artificial intelligence has come to stay in the workplace. What does the future hold for AI and the world of work?
The job security fear factor
Will AI take your job? It’s the question we’ve all been asking ourselves this year (or our parents have been asking us when returning home – get ready for a further discussion around the Christmas table this year).
According to a survey by Acuity Training, 27% of respondents have used AI at work, but are not worried about AI taking their job. Meanwhile, 10% who have used it are genuinely worried about their jobs being taken by an AI replacement.
As adoption of AI grows, it’s estimated that chatbots are going to save the banking, healthcare, and retail sectors a total of $11 billion in 2023.
It is estimated that generative AI could replace 300 million full time jobs. Just this year, the CEO of IBM predicted that 30% of his staff will be replaced by AI in the next five years.
One thing’s for sure – for a lot of sectors, your job security could come down to understanding how to harass AI to make your own role even more essential. That said, it’s not as simple as “just start using AI for your tasks”…
Clumsy rollouts
Not every business has understood the complications of introducing a new technology into the office, and the work required to do so effectively.
“Startups rightly jumped on using this technology to improve existing processes, but some failed to see the initial applications for their team or product, and saw it more as a gimmick,” points out Erik Wikander, CEO and cofounder at tech startup Zupyak.
On the one hand, there were businesses like Klarna which championed that all employees needed to use AI and managed to get as much as half of the staff adopting it on a daily basis.
Disasters for brand trust
For most cases, human intervention is still needed. Some disastrous and controversial user cases that have tarnished business’s reputation because they used AI surreptitiously, not telling in-house staff or customers what they were doing, and in some cases misrepresenting their brand entirely.
Just recently, Devternity founder Eduard Sizovs fabricated a female speaker using generative AI for a tech conference, which soon after collapsed. The founder got called out for falsely boosting diversity, causing several big-name speakers to publicly drop out of the conference.
CNET also paused publishing AI-written stories after getting engulfed in controversy. This happened after CNET came under fire for its use of AI tools on stories, which had been in use for months with little transparency to readers or staff.
Alarming data implications
The rush to roll AI into workflows hasn’t been without missteps – most crucially over what this means for sensitive business data.
Disastrous consequences emerged for Samsung workers who unwittingly leaked top secret data whilst using the chatbot to help them with tasks. This caused confidential Samsung meeting notes and new source code to be publicly available.
“Startups shouldn’t underestimate the effort involved in introducing a new technology and making people use it,” warns Wikander. “It all comes down to a culture of learning, and the startups who have succeeded probably saw this opportunity and took it on actively.”
Re-evaluating ‘valuable’ tasks
Artificial intelligence has also pushed businesses to re-evaluate what they consider valuable tasks – and which ones are tasks that should be automated.
“It has elevated creativity by taking away time-intensive aspects of copywriting, content creation, formatting, even tone of voice,” foregrounds Mark Barry, EMEA Managing Director at HubSpot.
“Overall, it challenged the entire software industry to step up and deliver long-awaited functionality that significantly reduces repeatable, predictable tasks,” he adds.
This recalibration has similarly made the iterative process of creative new products more streamlined. As Wikander notes, the technology has empowered businesses to rethink a function or process to create products that couldn’t be created without the helping hand of generative AI.
“The core problem we are addressing at Zupyak is how to efficiently market your business without relying on external marketing agencies that often get you mixed results at sometimes a high cost,” he notes. “Thanks to AI, we can replace the end-to-end marketing processes, from coming up with a plan to content creation and distribution or media buying.”
