Due to factors like remote work and AI, everything about the way we work is changing, from productivity strategies to company cultures. Although this transformation is daunting, it brings with it the opportunity for employees to upskill and focus on uniquely human tasks.
The Time is Now
AI is being adopted rapidly in offices across the globe, with Ernest & Young reporting that "last year just 49% of employees said they were using or planned to use GenAI in the following 12 months. A year later, we see 75% of employees using GenAI." This is changing the workflow in many companies, as well as changing the approach to productivity.
This rapid adoption of AI has brought a plethora of use cases, including IT processes, customer service, supply chain, human resources, finance, and more. According to IBM, AI is being implemented across these areas to do things from predictive analytics and data analysis to acting as a virtual assistant.
In a similar report published by McKinsey, they found that employees were twice as likely as employers to believe that they will use gen AI for more than 30 percent of their daily tasks within a year, highlighting how employees are largely familiar with and ready to use AI tools, even more so than employers may realize.
However, in terms of perceived impact, this trend was inversed. Ernst & Young found that, while both employees and employers have a net positive view of the impact of AI, employers perceive this effect 2 times as much.
Taking the Busy Out of Business
For employers, AI has the potential to speed up current processes within a company by cutting costs and optimizing workflows. For employees, it has the potential to automate routine tasks.
While this might sound like jobs will be replaced by AI, the reality is that very few jobs could ever be fully automated, and most jobs will continue to require a human touch. In a report from the International Labor Organization, they wrote that "the most important impact of the technology is likely to be of augmenting work – automating some tasks within an occupation while leaving time for other duties – as opposed to fully automating occupations."
This is great news for people, because it means more time to focus on tasks that need human input. These tasks usually involve more of what people do best - creativity and problem solving. With proper implementation, AI can be developed in a way that uses its capabilities to augment human talent.
The way that companies choose to implement AI will be one of the most important factors in its development. Luckily, the future is looking bright so far. In fact, in the same report published by McKinsey, they found that "71 percent of employees trust their employers to act ethically as they develop AI. In fact, they trust their employers more than universities, large technology companies, and tech start-ups."
Lifelong Learning
Omar Sultan Al Olama, Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy, and Remote Work Applications in the in the UAE, who spoke at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum last January, touched upon the subject of continuous learning and development, saying that "the half-life of skills used to be 30 years. It's now seven years." This means that, over the course of a career, people will have to change their overall skillset much more frequently, potentially up to five times more.
This shortening of how long skills remain relevant means that employees need to continuously refine and enhance their knowledge and capabilities in order to keep up with the changing landscape. Therefore, the best way for companies to attract top talent is to offer learning and development programs that facilitate this.
In reference to this, Ernest & Young added in their report that "the users of the fastest evolving technologies are the ones needing to continuously learn and improve to keep up with changes." They also brought up the idea of external learning and development as part of a solution, saying that some employees might prefer external accreditations or benefit from upskilling led by a third party.
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