The acceleration of technology brings advantages that bear directly on labour productivity and on better results from business strategy. To obtain those results and advantages, companies have to think about renewing their business models, optimising their organisational structures and building skills in their people.
These changes are a mix of new technologies and new employee skills. Unfortunately, companies expect their people's skills to adapt as quickly as the technological changes arrive.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of those changes where applying technology can be associated with replacing human labour, if capabilities are not built in the workforce. That fear has accompanied developed societies for a long time, and it will surely come to pass as AI systems grow more sophisticated[1] — for as long as human skills fail to keep up.
Accenture PLC's global study of more than 1,000 large companies that already use or are testing artificial intelligence systems identified the emergence of entire categories of new kinds of work that only humans can do. These roles do not replace the old ones: they are new, and they call for unprecedented skills and training[2].
That study indicates that the following kinds of job will appear in support of artificial intelligence systems:
Jobs in which human beings guide AI systems on how they should work. You can see this function in customer-service chatbots acting as virtual assistants — Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana and Amazon's Alexa all have to be trained.
A set of roles made up of people who help review the decisions AI has taken that run counter to conventional wisdom. These roles will be found in greater numbers once AI is applied at scale.
The last category of new jobs identified by the study is the “sustainers”. They will help guarantee that artificial intelligence systems work as planned and that unforeseen consequences are addressed with the right urgency — which is crucial.
In fact, the effect of many of these new positions may amount to a growth in the current workforce that slowly replaces traditional jobs. Where and how those workers will be trained remain open questions.
It matters that companies have strategic partners who have built a workforce prepared for designing, developing and implementing artificial intelligence techniques.
[1] From Race Against the Machine, E. Brynjolfsson and A. McAfee, 2011. [2] Adapted from “The Jobs that Artificial Intelligence will Create”, H. James Wilson, Paul Daugherty and Nicola Morini-Bianzino, MIT Sloan Management Review, 23 March 2017.
