How AI and automation are changing the nature of work

Many of us treat the technological substitution of employees, entrepreneurs, workers, etc. as a cause of concern, but complementarity as a good. In a recent study, scholars have predicted that by 2030 global economy might benefit from artificial intelligence (AI) by up to $16 trillion. The present time is evident that AI may enhance productivity or wages for those who remain employed, on the other hand, it may have a negative or mixed impact on worker well-being. The potential risk of labor substitution due to automation is a subject of great concern. According to McKinsey, by 2030, 30 percent of the world’s human labor could be replaced by intelligent agents such as AI bots and robots. The rapid development of AI technology has raised debates about the future of work and whether there will be any work in the future for humans. Experts believe that business managers might benefit from enhancing their abilities with AI-enabled tools or become powerless and dependent on AI-enabled results. 

AI-enabled tools do a lot these days in every sector, beyond what we were thinking a few years back. For instance, in maintenance planning, production and utilization of assets can be optimized and thus improved using AI, therefore, business managers can easily find the root causes of likely losses and find solutions using AI engines. According to IBM, 85 percent of retailers have planned to adopt AI-enabled intelligent automation for supply chain planning. Nowadays, companies like lenskart use virtual AR experience to try on their spectacles online, and thereby the lens is created using German robotic machines thus reducing human labor. Food delivery companies such as Zomato have fired several hundred customer care employees due to automation. The same job such as tracking food delivery executives, and modifying or canceling orders is done by an AI bot. In fact, the entire retail industry paradigm is witnessing rapid change due to AI and automation. Organizations have realized that a competent workforce and real-time data analytics support will succeed soon, so they are adopting the change as early as possible. This will help organizations in effective decision-making with a more diverse staff with the latest skills and newer positions. 

However, the adverse effect will be that people without the latest skills will lose jobs due to automation, but experts believe that in order to sustain the competition the managers will have to update their skills as early as possible. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work, often from home has become a new norm not just for companies but for educational institutes too. This sudden change has forced organizations to adopt new ways of working and learning. Due to automation using AI which includes the implementation of advanced technologies, organizations are experiencing an extremely rapid digital transformation. The effect of such technologies allows different modes of work and has also advanced the “future of work” more rapidly than anticipated. From the discussion on AI and automation, four insights can be drawn. The first is that AI technology enables more tasks to be done with less effort. The second is that AI technology may create more opportunities for people to work but may not provide them the material security that traditional jobs gave them. This means AI managers or engineers will have to continuously update their skills to stay in the race. The third is that the huge technological shift such as AI has created a lot of opportunities but at the same time many people lost jobs due to automation. Therefore, massive structural-technological unemployment should not be considered a dystopian vision, but a reasonable expectation. The fourth is that governments will have to take an important role in guaranteeing the job security of citizens.

Long before the advent of AI, there were fears that automation would take away jobs from humans and make them redundant. Contrastingly, academicians, industrialists as well as scholars believe that AI and automation could create more opportunities for humans to work closely with upcoming technological innovations. The technological effects of AI within an organization can be broadly classified into two categories: automation and augmentation. Automation refers the machines taking over humans and doing the same job as humans do but with more efficiently and much faster. Augmentation implies that humans work in close collaboration with machines to perform various tasks. The recent developments in AI reveal that AI may automate as well as augment human activities. However, the practitioners in the area of strategy and innovation find it necessary to question where and when AI is useful for product and process performance. Since automation and augmentation are not mutually exclusive, therefore it makes no sense to treat them as separate. A common debate among academicians and industrialists is whether AI will mainly be assistants and managers and other workers doing groundwork such as data collection, thereby augmenting human capabilities and making them ready for creative decision-making. However, experts believe that AI may both automate and augment human activities.

The article has been written by Dr. Akhter Mohiuddin Rather, Associate Professor, Data Sciences and AI, Great Lakes Institute of Management, Gurgaon