We hear everywhere about how generative artificial intelligence is revolutionizing our professional lives: from its ability to automate mundane daily tasks to producing personalized avatars to take our place in meetings.
But to what extent does the average worker still understand the opportunities and risks of their career and how can they make the most of rapidly changing technology?
The question has attracted the interest of the Financial Times To work podcast to produce a three-part how-to miniseries on AI at work: what it can do, what it can’t do – and what might happen in the future.
The podcast’s host and producer boiled down what they learned into five key takeaways. Listen to the series in full here, or wherever you get your audio.
1. AI helps with succession planning and career progression
Everyone knows that generative AI is trained on the data it receives, and when it comes to its use in recruiting, this has drawbacks. Much attention has been paid to potential bias in hiring and other sinister (hopefully unintended) consequences. If the data contains human biases, these will be reflected in potentially discriminatory AI decisions.
But Chano Fernandez, co-CEO of Eightfold, an AI-powered talent platform, highlights how technology can improve recruiting practices.
“Usually big [tech] companies tend to think about succession management for the top 200 leaders,” he says. AI expands this – one might say democratizes it – by suggesting succession plans for lower-ranked employees and helping companies identify candidates for open positions from a wider pool.
The software can highlight vacancies to a large number of people, but it can also show candidates the key skills they are lacking for a particular vacancy. This gap might prevent workers from getting jobs this time around, but, Fernández says, AI helps workers envision the future in a more structured way. It will show them how to acquire the skills necessary to be eligible for that level of employment, but it will also, he suggests, “expose different career paths, different paths that [they] could have as a professional.”
This is useful for companies preparing to hire and also inspires workers to plan their careers more imaginatively.
2. Prompt Engineer will be a high demand job
Rapid engineering — the words, queries and requests that are fed into an AI tool to generate the desired result — is going to be THE This is a profession that will be in high demand in the future (so those humanities degrees may not be in vain). Generative AI is only as effective as the instructions humans give it are accurate. So we need to develop our communication skills, and she will learn with us.
Marcus du Sautoy, Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, explains how it works: “I’m not yet particularly good at encouraging [AI] to go in the directions that I would like to push. [But} I can see that there are already people who are practically artists of the prompt. They are almost writing poetry into the AI, which elicits . . . incredible visual or oral responses.”
Dan Sherratt, vice-president of creative and innovation at the design agency Poppins, gives a practical example of the basics of prompt engineering: “It still is a computer. It still responds to commands. And that is still, essentially, when you break that down to its simplest form, ones and zeros. You have to give it commands in order to receive the right answers. For example, you could ask it specifically to create a photograph that was shot on a specific kind of film, with a specific camera at a specific time of day. So recreating images is far more impressive than just using it like a stock photography search engine.”
Prompt engineering is a skill — not just a set of instructions — and companies are increasingly likely to need to hire people who are good at it.
3. AI is already taking our work — but not the good stuff
When we asked our podcast guests about AI models taking away their work, they said broadly the same thing: AI is (or will soon be) taking some of it. But it is not taking away the parts that necessarily matter to them. This reminds us of the well-established practice of “job crafting”, where workers are allowed to ditch the bits of their job that they don’t like in order to get more meaning and purpose from the parts they value. In the past, this probably meant an unfortunate colleague was landed with your boring data inputting or admin tasks. Now generative AI can do it.
To ease the demands on her time, Iliana Oris Valiente, an executive at Accenture Canada, turns to her “digital twin,” Laila. Trained on years of Accenture case studies and research reports, Laila “can and absolutely will” attend meetings in Valiente’s stead. That means tasks get done more quickly, as Valiente is freed up — and she can dodge repetitive conversations about previous projects. “By the time you’ve had [that conversation] 15 times is really not very interesting,” she says.
The podcast team’s biggest question is whether we should allow digital assistants, and AI in general, to take over more of our work. We asked Madhumita Murgia, AI editor at the FT and author of Code addiction: living in the shadow of AI, to give us his perspective on what technology can – and can’t – do for us at work. There are two aspects to this: first, the human aspect. We may not feel comfortable with an avatar coming to our meetings. And what does it mean for the team if a manager simply never shows up in person? A digital twin can even look like the boss – Laila looks like Iliana, for example – but maybe that makes it even weirder?
And, most importantly, AI invent things. As Murgia says: “I think it’s going to take a lot more behavior change to get these twins or assistants to do our job, because they’re not entirely accurate. They are riddled with errors. This is inherent, in fact, to the behavior of generative AI systems. They invent things.
“So if we’re wondering if a digital twin can take notes in a crucial meeting and we need to act accordingly, that’s a big step forward from a human perspective. I’m not convinced that we’re all going to absolve ourselves of responsibility for this. »
4. Creative work created by man will be a luxury and high status product
We’re often happy to pay more for a coffee made in a trendy shop, where the barista puts his signature design on the foam, rather than choosing a (slightly) cheaper drink ejected at the touch of a button. This analogy can help explain the potential future of creative work. We’ll pay extra for the cachet and superiority of something made by hand (or mind, in this case).
When it comes to jobs, this means that high-value individual creative work involved in sectors such as design and marketing is not likely to be replaced by AI in the near future.
Dan Sherratt says his company uses AI “almost exclusively as part of the pitch and proposal process” and would not use it in executing the creative work itself. “It’s really good for conceptual work, but still not as good as you might hope for producing finished files. »
He notes that “the highest value is [already] applied to things that were made with harder work[in industries such as fashion]“You’re buying a pair of custom shoes from an Italian shoemaker whose family business is hundreds of years old, as opposed to a pair of mass-produced sneakers from a sweatshop that has no intrinsic value or story to tell. So creatively, maybe that’s where we could go.”
5. AI can help introverts shine
The use of AI in recruiting is already quite widespread, with tools that can do things like filter applications and help candidates write their CVs. Ali Ansari, founder of recruiting service micro1, is taking it a step further by introducing an interviewer avatar in his AI-powered system for software engineers. He says this can be particularly beneficial for introverts and people with neurodiverse conditions like autism, for example, who may find face-to-face interviews (whether online or in person) intimidating.
Does an avatar ease tension? Yes, says Ansari. “We have seen a lot of comments on this subject,” the candidates essentially say. “I’m an introvert and it was really great. I was able to talk about the type of architecture of a back-end system or the design of a front-end system, without being nervous about talking to another human.
He says this type of digital interview can improve the candidate experience and “ultimately be much better than a human technical interview.”
As new generations enter the workforce after spending their childhoods gaming, avatar interviewers will likely emerge as a natural progression.
