Why we shouldn’t fear the rise of AI

Programs like ChatGPT, which have taken to the workforce and world by storm, may make some anxious as we question whether our job will become obsolete.

While some jobs will certainly be lost to the rise of AI, there are opportunities, and new roles are constantly emerging alongside this new tech.

“AI will help businesses, and AI will help people. Will AI automate some jobs? Yes, and it has already done so. So there will be some jobs that will be increasingly automated with AI. However, that will create a number of new jobs, where people with the needed skills will be able to add a lot of value,” said Cornerstone chief international officer Vincent Belliveau.

“The world is changing so fast; you have the World Economic Forum’s statistics that highlight and are accelerating those statistics, how millions of jobs will disappear, but millions of new jobs will be created, and how the obsolescence of a skill becomes irrelevant very, very fast, much faster than before. And therefore, people need to learn all that and develop.”

Using AI to your advantage is a great way to utilise this emerging tech and help streamline processes.

Mr Belliveau continued: “You want to leverage AI to auto-detect the skills of people to recommend the potential career paths they could have based on their specific skills. The same screening on the same application for you, or for me, would recommend very different career tracks, very different learning interventions, very different potential projects, [and] mentorships gigs that would be relevant.

“[It creates] a very different view of yourself, if you will, an understanding of yourself, thanks to AI. And that’s impossible to manually map out; even a company of 500 employees will struggle to manage this amount of data. And the problem is compounded with our customers that range from the hundreds of employees to the hundreds of thousands of employees.”

As technology advances, there are certain careers that will be at the forefront of the digitisation.

“Anything around data and analytics will be really important. So that’s an area of investment that everyone needs to develop, being comfortable with data. In other areas comfortable with tech, we had a customer this morning highlight how they’re working on digital literacy as a critical capability for all their employees, not just those in tech, but every single employee,” explained Mr Belliveau.

“There is no job that’s immune from needing to understand tech. Gone is the day [when] you would go to your IT department and say, I need help with this, please [sort it] out. You need to work with the technology and embrace the technology.”

He continued: “Then, finally, soft skills are critical. And that’s the good news relative to AI for people. It’s the ability of people to navigate through uncertainty, to deal with change at an accelerated pace, the ability for people to have this extreme sense of customer centricity really driving that outcome for the customer, that all of that requires unique soft skills, also managing international workforce, potentially global workforce, managing a hybrid workforce, those are really important skills.”

Jack Campbell

Jack is the editor at HR Leader.