Artificial Intelligence (AI) has long been thought of as a sci-fi fantasy that may happen sometime in the future. It is looked at with a sense of fear (fear of AI take over, fear of job loss, and so on). In reality, AI has been around for years and is taking the world by storm. From impacting our search results and enabling faster decision-making to influence our shopping habits and working as digital assistants, AI is all around us.
AI is generating massive value, infusing greater efficiency, and accelerating innovation. It is touted to play a crucial role in organizational digital transformation and the future of work. With AI is developing at a rapid pace, it is critical to understand how it will impact the future of work and be well-equipped for an AI-augmented world.
AI will not make the human workforce obsolete!
AI is the ability of machines/ bots to replicate tasks performed by human executives by processing data sets and algorithms. Equipped with Machine Learning (ML) capabilities, AI can learn, improve and change itself based on the data inputted, thereby, displaying intelligence. Owing to this, an immense amount of fear of job loss and world takeover is associated with AI adoption. However, the reality is less dire.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Work Report 2020, 85 million existing jobs will be displaced by 2025 due to the changing division of labor between humans, machines, and algorithms. However, 97 million new jobs will be created owing to the shift. The jobs that remain will be reshaped and redesigned to do away with non-productive, low-value tasks.
As per data, AI adoption is predicted to yield USD 15 trillion to the global GDP by 2030. A global McKinsey survey found that 63% of AI adopters reported growth in revenues with those from high-performing companies reporting over 10% revenue gains. 44% of the respondents of this survey also reported cost reductions from AI adoption with the high performers seeing over 10% cost savings.
How will Digital Enablement Platform and AI add value to the human workforce and the business?
What is Digital Enablement Platform?
A digital enablement platform is a software designed to assist people with performing digital tasks and improve their productivity in the digital workplace.
AI is enhancing the way people work, rather than putting their jobs at risk. It is augmenting human intelligence with real-time insights from large data sets that could take days for human executives to manually process. This is enabling faster decision-making and much high accuracy. It is empowering human executives and businesses to innovate, drive the growth of the business and the industry and even generate more jobs. Some of the common AI use cases are conversational bots, digital assistants, fraud detection, data security, recommendations, online search, predictive analytics, etc.
AI is widely deployed to take on repetitive, manual, and data-intensive tasks as they take a fraction of the time and resources that would otherwise be required. The cost of human error and productivity loss from such repetitive tasks is eliminated.
For instance, businesses saw a massive influx of customer queries during the COVID-19 pandemic. Given their limited resources, they were unable to increase their servicing capacity even as their human agents were overworked. During this period, several businesses woke up to the benefits of chatbots and increasingly deployed them to scale up their servicing capacity while maintaining quality. In fact, IBM recorded a 40% upsurge in traffic on its conversational AI platform, Watson Assistant, from February to April 2020. Chatbots could handle the bulk of queries that were repetitive in nature and be available 24×7. Human agents would be brought on only when the chatbot isn’t equipped to address certain queries.
AI is not equipped to do everything human beings can, which is why it cannot replace humans, at least in the foreseeable future. One of the major limitations is that AI is equipped to solve only one problem at a time and execute one task at a time. They cannot think outside the box or handle changes in inputs. This is why they are best suited for bulk, repetitive tasks.
In a sense, AI possesses only specialized intelligence not generalized intelligence like humans. Human intelligence is irreplaceable and holds great value in the business for problem-solving, abstract thinking, critical judgment, innovation, and creativity across domains.
Blended workforces are the future!
Humans and AI will work together in blended workforces in the future. Digital Enablement Platform and AI empowers businesses to make their business processes more efficient and their employees more productive. Businesses can weed out 65% of manual, repetitive tasks, and free up employee bandwidth to focus on high-value tasks and solving critical business challenges. They can reap 3X productivity gains by augmenting their human executives with intelligent automation.
However, limitations and challenges in AI adoption create roadblocks and may affect the ROI from AI implementation. These include security considerations, malicious use, and privacy, feeding existing biases into AI, high dependencies on legacy systems, and lack of collaboration.
For a blended workforce to operate seamlessly and maximize business outcomes, businesses need to create a proper roadmap to start their digital enablement journey, addressing the roadblocks effectively. They need to foster a culture of collaboration between AI and the human workforce. Businesses must, most importantly, equip their human workforce with the new skillsets to thrive in an AI-augmented future workplace.
Conclusion
It is not man vs machine anymore. There needs to be a shift in perspective. Businesses need to start making changes today to gain an edge and be well-equipped for the future of work.