7 jobs that will be radically disrupted by AI and automation
‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘Machine Learning’ are the most favoured terms in any industry today. While they make their inroads into almost all fields, let’s take a look at the 7 industries that will be most impacted by their presence.
Chatbots have become synonymous with AI but their efficiency has been a topic of hot debate for some time now. In the past, people were sceptical of how AI, specifically chatbots, would enter modern-day companies; today, the questions centre around how good the bots can be.
The success of chatbots in the current landscape is heavily dependent on two things: performing mechanical and basic analytical tasks to free up employee time and the bot’s ability to interact conversationally.
AI has already made its mark in several industries and here, we present to you, in no particular order, a list of the seven jobs that will see the biggest increase in efficiency and productivity via AI and automation.
1. Customer service
Customer Service is the first function that comes to mind when we think of automation, AI, and chatbots. Most of us are familiar with automated responses from various businesses. Unfortunately, these have been less than pleasant (especially when we’re trying to reach our bank officials!).
Chatbots add a more conversational and efficient layer to this process. They make these interactions more seamless for the customers and the customer service representatives, both of whom are thus able to avoid, to an extent, unnecessary, sometimes frustration-inducing engagements.
Several big brands, like Uber, Pizza Hut, Domino’s have incorporated chatbots in their Customer Service strategy. While the example of ordering items might seem quite basic, it paves the way for chatbots to execute more intuitive conversations, enabling them to augment human service workers in more complex scenarios, like troubleshooting technical issues or providing detailed responses to complaints. Thus, chatbot inclusion helps businesses ensure that their customer service representatives are able to increase their productivity, focusing on problems and tasks that require human attention.
2. Human resources
Ah, Human Resources! The least liked department in almost any company. Can chatbots really help an industry that, according to most people (not us), is heartless at its core? Surprisingly, yes — and they can help HR personnel show their human side too.
A process-heavy undertaking, HR needs to loop in several stakeholders — from new hires to Managers, to the Finance Team, to Senior Managers et al — for most decisions, be it hiring, onboarding, or relieving from work. Chatbots aid in providing the necessary information to all stakeholders in a timely manner and via an easily accessible database.
Let’s take the instance of interviewees requesting for status updates or an existing employee asking whether they have Christmas off. Instead of sending these queries directly to the HR, who probably gets countless similar ones, the questions get routed via the chatbot and the respective parties get the relevant responses automatically. In one-off cases, where the question or task is unprecedented, the chatbot can bring the HR representative’s attention to it and the HR can then handle the matter directly.
This helps free up an HR representative’s time and they can focus on the more challenging tasks at hand — employee satisfaction, streamlining processes, understanding hiring requirements of different departments, even understanding and befriending employees.
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3. Security professionals
Security provides an interesting use-case for artificial intelligence. AI and machine learning have been a part of cybersecurity for a while now, making tasks easier for both security professionals as well as cyber attackers/hackers.
Helping the Security industry are products like IBM’s Watson, which augments the efforts of security professionals. AI is essentially able to comprehend the behaviour of normal users, raising a red flag to security professionals when it deems any activity to be out of the ordinary. Artificial intelligence also widens the scope of experimentation and research done by security representatives, enhancing their productivity and providing greater insight. Essentially, AI implementation helps to understand the possible risks and the potential of AI-infused technology, keeping them, hopefully, a step ahead of black hat hackers and cyber-attackers.
4. Marketing
Automation has become a godsend for industries like marketing. A data-centric and data-reliant field, marketing can gain much by incorporating chatbots and artificial intelligence technology that makes it easier to analyse and access information in an efficient, timely manner.
Additionally, based on the user’s responses, the chatbot can take further action on behalf of the user. The user, a Marketing Manager, for example, might want to know how well a campaign did in terms of product sales. She or he can easily refer to the bot and then ask the bot to execute other tasks based on this information. They can get scattered market data from the bot, which the chatbot then analyses and displays in a comprehensive, visual format, saving time for the people involved and increasing their efficiency.
Interaction with bots is set to get easier as chatbots are becoming more domain and vertical-specific, with NLP adding to their overall functionality.
5. Business intelligence (BI)
Data accumulation, data analytics, data representation, insight discovery. Business intelligence is a job heavily dependent on information, on getting data and analysing it for relevant insights. Since it is humanly impossible to go through all the data in the world, the inclusion of AI technology and automation provides a beneficial opportunity to sift through information effectively, provide more in-depth insights, and make it accessible at any point. In addition, drag-and-drop GUI, aided by NLP and Natural Language Generation, will make it easier to gather insights sans “custom-coding a solution”, making the analytics available to professionals not familiar with data or data analytics. As the cherry on top, artificial technology also lessens the work required to build custom apps and tools for Business Intelligence and makes data processing of unstructured data easier.
“AI-infused BI will somewhat, albeit not completely, automate all of the steps necessary to transform data into formats and models that BI tools can work with. This includes machine learning-based data discovery and machine learning-based data curation — cleansing, integration and so on” — Boris Evelson, Vice President and principal analyst at Forrester Research
This onslaught of automation, however, is not to be feared. Evelson is of the opinion that the aforementioned changes will greatly increase the amount of data available for analysis, thus increasing the number of jobs for data analysts.
6. Software engineers/web developers
We can expect better, more intuitive digital experiences as AI helps developers and designers access relevant information with increased speed, greater efficiency, and comprehensive representation. Developers can easily understand their users’ behaviours and create contextual experiences accordingly.
In terms of software, AI is likely to aid in the creation of products, automating security, developing additional features, and maybe even encouraging self-healing in applications. The possibilities are endless!
7. CIO
CIO is set to be one of the industries most affected by the introduction of automation and AI. A large number of tasks have the potential to be automated and this calls for a massive restructuring within the field. This holds the promise of increasing productivity by ensuring an effective delegation of work amongst the human employees, while the monotonous, mechanical tasks are handled by AI and automation.
“The CIO’s workforce will be comprised of a mix of digital workers — RPA bots, AI programs, chatbots — and humans, and, keeping this mixed workforce in mind, the CIO will need to hire and train human workers for RQ — the Robotics Quotient, Forrester’s term for the skills required to work well with machines and AI” — J.P. Gownder, Vice President and principal analyst at Forrester Research
Another interesting facet of this is the AI assistant. Junior and mid-management employees seldom have personal human assistants or secretaries, but with the advent of AI, it is imminent that every worker will have an AI-powered one (personal assistant), making it easier to set reminders and schedule meetings, in accordance with the behaviour pattern of each worker.
Conclusion
Chatbots have not yet reached the level of intelligence many of us had envisioned, but the mass acceptance of AI across industries is a promising start. Interactions between customer and businesses are process-heavy, resulting in several frustrated parties and sub-par efficiency. Today, chatbots are primarily used for queries, but as can be seen from the list, this seems to be changing. We are on the edge of a massive digital transformation and there is constant innovation taking place in the background to make it happen. As the world continues to develop AI, machine learning, NLP, and NLG technologies, we come closer to a more efficient, decluttered world.
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Originally posted on Botbot.AI’s Blog
