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Artificial intelligence is going to fundamentally change the nature of jobs, said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at a recent Wall Street Journal event. And while he views this change as positive, he acknowledges the rate at which it's happening requires a bigger discussion take place now on what work will mean in the near- and long-term.
The changes are expected to happen in several ways: from replacing, supporting and creating jobs, to transforming the purpose of jobs and how they are performed.
Reworked spoke with some workforce leaders about these dynamics and what they believe AI means for roles, departments and organizations in general.
1. Jobs Replaced by AI
Lisa Sterling, chief people officer at employee insights platform Perceptyx, said generative AI crunches and analyzes numbers well, and as the tech learns, improves and evolves, it is putting various types of jobs at risk — software developers, engineers, technical writers, data analysts and legal assistants, for instance.
Those roles are top of mind, she said, because they all require a significant amount of data, analysis and repeatable actions that AI can automate.
Cara Brennan Allamano, chief people officer at people management platform Lattice, said it would indeed be naive to assume that AI won’t dramatically alter certain roles and eliminate others, as organizations realize the potential of AI to augment and automate a wide range of processes.
She used recruiting as an example. Some of the tasks recruiting employees take on early in their career, such as outreach and scheduling, are more likely to become automated processes, she said, though noting that companies must also not lose sight of the fact that some of these more “elemental” tasks are also great learning opportunities.
Clare Hart, CEO of the business support services firm Williams Lea, said while AI is likely to replace laborious tasks that require little judgment, it may never replace what human workers bring to the table because AI follows algorithms that cannot measure emotion, context, personality and history. “We will always need humans to monitor and wield AI,” Hart said.
Jamaal Justice, principal of people advisory services at consulting firm EY, agrees, adding that for the vast majority of jobs, the risk of asking AI to fully take on what humans do today is not one many organizations are interested in taking yet.
Related Article: Reality Check: The Truth About How AI Will Impact Jobs
2. Jobs Supported by AI
There is a difference, however, between replacing jobs — and workers — with AI and using the technology to improve jobs and support workers. And Justice said most jobs have the potential to eventually be supported by AI.
For instance, employees who use generative AI in their email, word processing, spreadsheet and presentation tools will see productivity gains, he said. Creative roles may benefit from sourcing ideas more effectively and coming up to speed more quickly on the needs of target audiences. Educators may benefit from creating new learning content more quickly.
Justice said AI can help employees be more human by taking their focus off of time-consuming tasks with minimal value and placing their focus on people and driving the highest impacts for their team, organization and customers.
He said his firm, however, expects roles that primarily involve physical tasks to benefit less from generative AI.
Sterling said companies may also deliver products and features faster by using AI to write code faster, more accurately and efficiently. In medicine, for instance, if a research analyst uses generative AI to review data, they can get faster access to insights, themes and diagnostics — reducing costs and moving faster to delivery, she said. AI can also be adopted in a supportive role to help nurses and doctors transcribe their notes, schedule meetings and perform basic administrative needs.
Sabra Sciolaro, chief people officer at workforce communication platform Firstup, said for all the talk about how companies can use AI, the reality is that much of the workforce is probably already using it through daily tools without even realizing it.
She said AI is already revolutionizing HR, for instance, by automating repetitive tasks, and AI chatbots and machine learning (ML) algorithms are helping to create new tools that streamline recruitment, onboarding and performance management.
Allamano said managers can use generative AI to compile and synthesize feedback to write a more powerful case for promoting a report, and hiring managers can use these capabilities to help them write job postings.
Hart said the financial, legal and professional services sectors are fast adopters of AI because the technology can support, on one hand, financial analysts by summarizing massive lists of data and, on the other, law firms by accurately sifting through vast volumes of legal documents.
Iliya Rybchin, partner at the consulting firm Elixirr, said the key to the future job market is not about upskilling employees as much as it is about what he refers to as co-skilling — the concept of humans combining their skills with AI to create “1 + 1 = 3 productivity.”
“Co-skilling will mean people will no longer look to hide their weaknesses but instead plug those holes with AI,” Rybchin said.
He said as AI solves more generic problems, the differentiation in an industry, such as consulting, will be which firms can solve the highly specialized problems.
Related Article: Employees Are Using AI, They're Just Not Telling You
3. Jobs Created by AI
Justice believes AI has been and will continue to be a driver of job growth across industries globally, as organizations advance their internal and customer-facing solutions. He said his firm expects to see new roles emerge to address AI strategy, data governance, cybersecurity, legal and risk.
He forecasts that there will be various new technical roles created as a result: AI security analysts, engineers, research scientists and data architects. There will be a call to HR and talent professionals to prepare their workforce to embrace AI and realize its value, resulting in evolved talent, change and learning roles, he said, adding that to manage the end-to-end process of bringing AI products to market, there will also be new AI vendor, product management and consulting roles.
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Hart said this job creation is already taking place with engineering and data science, as companies seek AI specialists to design, train and maintain AI systems. She’s also seeing new roles emerge in AI ethics and governance to ensure responsible AI implementation.
Christine Livingston, managing director and leader of AI and IoT at consulting firm Protiviti, said prompt engineers focused on optimizing the relevance and output of generative AI tools is also a new role created as a result of AI technology.
There are now opportunities to become AI trainers and managers, she said, such as training a bot how to respond to customer service inquiries; adapting a natural language processing (NLP) model to interpret new requests, products and services; sustaining conversational chatbots at contact centers; and reviewing model metrics over time and evaluating if the model hits key KPIs — and if it doesn’t, determining why.
Related Article: How to Identify the Right Workplace Processes to Automate
4. Jobs Transformed by AI
Justice said he’s also seeing jobs shift in how they are performed. For example, he notes the shifts from creators of content to reviewers, editors and curators; from employees spending large amounts of time trying to find the right content to spending more time consuming content and using it for its intended purpose; or from entering and administering data to consuming and driving impactful decisions, using insights from data.
The power of generative AI to support research and ideation, create and transform content, and process and summarize data frees capacity for employees, Justice said, enabling them to focus on becoming proficient consumers of AI-derived content as well as strategy, creativity, decision-making, learning and being more human-centric in interactions with colleagues and customers.
Hart agreed that with AI handling routine tasks, employees can bring more of their creativity, emotional intelligence, critical thinking and complex problem-solving skills into work, differentiating how a team and business may approach a problem or opportunity. AI enhances employees and gives them time, so they can expand their attention to more strategic activities, she said.
John Lyotier co-founder and CEO at TravelAI, said when employees are involved in AI-related work, they can add levels of nuance and contextual understanding that aren’t yet available to AI models. Innovative ideas, he said, will most likely come from people, as AI models are trained on data that is publicly available.
Related Article: Artificial Intelligence Is Poised to Take More Than Unskilled Jobs
5. Jobs Repurposed by AI
Justice said overall, the opportunity that AI introduces is for an improved experience for business leaders, managers, employees and customers alike, and ideally, a more human experience at work — letting machines do what they do best and letting humans do what they do best.
Hart said AI is a tool that has the ability to audit and improve work, creating a new category of critical thinking, because it can identify improvements, issues and questions employees may not catch due to lack of experience or human error. This will drive a spike in work quality and change how employees think about approaching and completing projects.
Lyotier said many jobs will focus on increasing productivity and efficiency and making informed decisions based on those insights. “But within this transformation, it is not a dystopian outcome,” he said. “In fact, it is the exact opposite. Humanity is needed to infuse the soul into the machine.
“We believe tomorrow’s labor force will be freed up to focus on the tasks they enjoy. They will have time to travel, to create memories, to learn and to build and create things that are new. We are about to enter a new age of enlightenment. It is ours if we embrace it.”
