Will AI Disrupt Or Enhance White Collar Jobs?
Everyone is pressed for time. There is more to do than ever before. Deadlines are shorter. Pressure is increasing. There is less tolerance for failure. Margins are eroding. Competition is getting fiercer even though new opportunities are being created. Work-life balance is being sought. Loyalty has been replaced by a culture in which you either perform and deliver or hit the road. Productivity gains are necessary and business model innovation is a must across the board. The nature and future of work has changed and Artificial Intelligence (AI) while all the buzz, is going to play a larger disruptive role in how the future pans out than we can imagine.
We’re already in the age of Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), whether we recognise it or not. The age of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will follow and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) looks more and more likely as an inevitability.
ANI, is considered to be weak AI, a form of AI that is focused on one narrow task with no real ability to think for itself. This is as opposed to strong AI which is a machine with a sense of itself, a form of consciousness or mind. It’s also in contrast with AGI which is a machine that can apply itself to broad general problems rather than a specific one. And ASI, in case you’re wondering is having Gin & Tonics on the beach, in perpetuity, time.
ANI is going to rule the roost between now and in and around the next 10 years, AGI beyond that and ASI yet further afield. The immediate key to productivity gains and business model innovation in organisations thus will depend on the adoption and exploitation of ANI systems. While there is much fear that this will be at the expense of human beings, there is a greater likelihood that this thrust towards automation may not ultimately happen at the expense of human beings at all. As a matter of fact, if history has taught us anything about humans and technology thus far, it is that technological advancements of a narrow nature have created more jobs than they have eliminated. Forget tractors replacing farmers, think about computers instead. Computers were supposed to put people out of jobs, but what happened instead was that people using computers ended up moving up the value chain instead leading to more job creation all round. Mobile first computing - the handphones, in the hands of people in under developed countries everywhere has moved more people up the value chain than anything before them and this is going to continue for some time.
Steve Jobs in the early days of Apple, spoke about how much more efficient a human being with a bicycle was when it came to efficiency of locomotion as opposed to a human being walking. He put out an idea of the computer being a bicycle for the mind, and it has in the corporate world, proven itself to be so. The problem with this bicycle for the mind, in the white collar world is that you still have to use your mind, eyes and hands to do a whole lot of additional menial work. In many areas it no longer has to be that way. That is the promise of the future you and I are walking into.
As an example, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), is eliminating repetitive and time consuming tasks on a computer that require no real thinking. Think of this as a robot in your computer that is automating the processes that you a human being would otherwise have to do, again and again for hours, weeks, months and years on end. This is usually data entry and data scrapping type work. Low level but important as it often forms the foundation for other work to be done on top of it.
But what about higher level, important as well as urgent work done by middle managers and senior executives, especially when it come to decision making, that impacts everything at a deeper and more critical level of the value chain like primary research for talent optimisation, customer journey and market research analytics? What are organisations and professionals presently doing with respect to that? Well, if they can afford it, they are sending it out at great expense to professional services firms and consultants to get it sorted out for them, because they can’t justify bringing those human resources in-house with any degree of economics of scale. Alternatively, and more so, many sizeable public and private organisations (and not just small and medium enterprises) are forgoing such intelligence. Intelligence that actually helps them to prevent unproductive situations from occurring or enables them to recover situations fast in the event that they happen. The absence of such ongoing employee, customer and market intelligence it also stops them from innovating their value proposition and gives their competition who have access to it, a chance to effortlessly stride past them.
Allow me to give you 3 examples.
In the world of talent, think of the cost of hiring the wrong employee, a poor onboarding process, disengaged workers, missing 360 assessments, non-existent performance appraisals, no succession planning, not welcoming whistleblowing and no idea as to why employees have left.
This process repeats itself when it comes to customers too. Imagine not knowing who your at risk customers are, what’s creating dissatisfaction, lagging customer feedback channels, no clue as to who your advocates are, not tapping into customer referrals, no mapping of the highs and lows of a customer journey, and no sense as to how your internal customer service value chain is performing.
It’s the exact same scenario when it comes to market research that is critical to informing intuition and helping to expand an organisation’s reach. Right from the start the cost of doing market research in the traditional way is in itself prohibitive as it involves outsourcing the work to an external agency and even if the budgets are available, the timelines of getting back research in the form of reports are so delayed it’s like swinging a baseball bat at a ball, when the ball has long passed you by and the fans have left the stadium.
We all know that time and tide wait for no man and you can’t step into the same river twice. But observing how presumably intelligent people in organisations are working dogmatically like it was still yesterday, makes you raise your eyebrow in astonishment.
It does not have to be that way, not for menial blue collar laborious and certainly not for higher value-added white collar intelligence work either. What if I told you the solution to move all your people up the intelligence spectrum by augmenting their human intelligence with artificial intelligence is already here?
Imagine a technology platform that allows you to get all forms of quantitative and qualitative intelligence in relation to your talent, customers and market in real-time. That you are able to do all of that and more in-house, on one platform, made accessible to all key employees, for them to get one version of the truth, so they can make real-time decisions with no one department being a choke or lag on the flow of intelligence. Now imagine all that data being graphically organised and benchmarked as it comes in across your local as well as global organisation, without any necessity for anyone to waste time in exporting the data to create pivot tables or use external software such as tableau for data visualisation.
If that’s not already a huge time saver and a heaven sent set of functionalities, imagine all qualitative data (which is notoriously difficult to analyse) being already analysed by an AI engine using natural language processing with an algorithm that analyses the sentence structure, does entity identification, sentiment analysis, is appreciative of magnitude and saliency which tells you instantaneously what are the top things you need to pay attention to and act on without having to read thousands of comments to make sense of it all. Imagine you also have access to automated AI report that gives you machine written insights the way a human would without you having to write it yourself and certainly not paying an external consultant to write it for you. Imagine giving access to those report to all your key staff so they too can see the full and summary views of all the data with additional rankings, heatmaps and correlation matrixes and so they can dive into the data to get the insights they desire to innovate at their own convenience appropriately. Imagine all this happening because of the power of AI in less than a second, while the traditional method in the hands of incredibly smart experts would take anywhere between 3 to 6 months, and still not get you anywhere even close to the depth of insights and functionalities described above.
Wouldn’t that instantaneously enhance white collar work and move your people up the value chain to do higher value work instead? Wouldn’t that extraordinarily reduce cost, improve productivity, make your workforce and value proposition stronger by an order of magnitude? Wouldn’t that give you the advantage you have thus far only be dreaming of so you can significantly out innovate your competition and gain an immediate strategic and operational advantage?
Well, that is what has consumed our time at CusJo over the last 3 years, as we’ve built the AI technology platform to do what I’ve described above and so much more.
Welcome to the new world of work, a world where human intelligence is enhanced by ANI, a world in which there is equal opportunity for you to either have your white collared job disrupted by ANI or enhanced by ANI. A world in which it’s up to you to either use ANI technologies to make more time for yourself or to stick to your old ways and be buried under a mountain on increasingly unproductive and uninspiring work.
It’s time to take the robot out of the human, and let the robot enhance humanity instead. The choice, you see, is upon us to make our choices and let the future unravel according to them. It should be pretty clear that it’s time to start making the right choice to use AI to enhance human intelligence, or truly risk falling behind instantaneously today, and irreparably in the immediate future.
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The article above was written by Manoj Sharma, the CEO of CusJo.com
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