I’m down to two candidates for my first hire, and one of them is A.I
From January, I will be focusing all of my time and energy on The Nordic Web (an online publication providing data-driven insight, analysis and opinion on the Nordic startup scene).
I’m excited to finally give it my full attention, and I’m currently raising money in order to help me meet the ambitions I have for it. This money will mainly be used to pay my salary, and one or two others. Over the last month or so, I have been sounding out the people that I would like to hire, and now have my preferred candidate selected.
They’re perfect for the role in terms of attitude, knowledge and skills, and would be an ideal first hire. In fact, if they didn’t want to/were unable to join, I actually don’t have another candidate who I could hire without feeling disappointed I didn’t get my first choice.
Or so I thought….
Last week, while reading the article Rise of the robowriters: How AI could crush the spreadsheet, I came across another strong candidate for my writers position: Quill, Narrative Science’s AI software.
Their description:
“Quill is our advanced natural language generation (Advanced NLG) platform for the enterprise that goes beyond reporting the numbers — it creates perfectly written narratives to convey meaning for any intended audience.”
This solution is exactly what I am looking for, as the role I am hiring for involves a lot of written curation, particularly around funding and exit news from Nordic startups, news that typically tends to be quite formulaic and number heavy and requires a small but concise narrative around it and therefore perfectly suited to the AI solution that Quill provides.
There’s also a number of other benefits that Quill offers over a human:
- It’s cheaper: Quill is available as SaaS product, and is significantly cheaper per month than hiring a human.
- There’s less administration to do: There are no HR, tax, personal issues/paperwork to deal with.
- It’s less time consuming: Managing people can be time consuming, an AI does not need to be managed.
Perfect, right?! Why would I need to hire a complicated human when I could hire simple AI instead?
Well, there is one major drawback to hiring the AI, as the funding and exit news curation is only one part of the role, the rest of it requires more imagination, creativity and pro-active work than AI can (currently) manage.
And a human is still more flexible, able to follow instructions and provide more free thought/original input than AI can, which puts it at a major disadvantage when it is under consideration to be an ‘employee’.
Therefore, rather than being hired instead of my human candidate, it’s likely that I will hire both, as importantly the AI can take on a lot of the formulaic work that needs doing, allowing the human more time to take on the more creative and complex work. Although the monetary cost may be higher to hire both, the cost of the humans time that will be saved by the AI more than justifies the price.
While AI is still rather limited in its capabilities, I believe it’s likely that initially we will see job shares with humans, allowing humans to be more effective and productive, rather than it replacing us at work completely.
However, while the conversation around robots and AI taking our jobs is predominantly set in a distant future, when a tiny media company is considering AI as its (one of its) first hire(s), I can’t help thinking that this day is arriving sooner than we may have originally thought.
N.B.: I’m a relative newcomer to the AI conversation (although it’s one that interests me greatly) so I apologise to any real enthusiasts for the lack of technical wording/understanding I have demonstrated, but to me, this is just further evidence that the potential hiring of AI is becoming more mainstream.
