Artificial Intelligence (AI) is expected to change the workforce, but is this new form of technology here to increase or lessen job opportunities?
There is always a polarizing opinion about AI. For some, it dawns a new era of quality and efficiency, where mundane tasks are a thing of the past. For others, AI opens a wild dystopian future, where robots and modern technology run businesses and companies, while the human workforce is at the sideline trying to make ends meet.
According to Tech Radar, AI is a hardware capable of thinking and deciding on its own based on data collected or installed. With this, it is capable of various skills such as speech recognition, image analysis, translation and many more. These capabilities enable AI to do tasks with high precision, efficiency, and accuracy- something humans cannot do. This is also the reason behind the fear of this modern technology.
Ultimately, this technology will soon replace jobs. According to a research by Laura Tyson, an economist from the University of California, Berkeley, already half of the activities that the workforce is paid to do can already be automated by an AI. She said that the lower the skill level, the higher the chance companies can automate it. Mundane, repetitive tasks are the first to go. Rule-based roles, like data entry and processing, can also be easily automated because these roles require little critical thinking and analysis.
While AI threatens to kill certain jobs, it will also open new job opportunities that will allow people to work smarter and perform higher-value work. One example is EY, a professional services firm based in London. They developed an AI that reads contracts and lease agreements, so their employees do not have to spend hours just to read and review them. This frees the employees to focus on more important tasks.
In the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, AI is far from spelling the end of the industry. It in fact allows millions of people working in the industry to create a high-value work that further develops the BPO sector. Currently, BPO employees waste a lot of time doing data entry tasks after each customer call. Sometimes there is a need to transfer calls to different departments just to help customers properly. With AI, these issues will lessen and will give agents the authority to pull up relevant information that would help customers better.
Everise, a customer experience company partnered with Microsoft to use an AI platform for its business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions. This enables them to do speech recognition, sentiment analysis and image recognition, which leads to more personalized customer experience. AI helps agents focus on interacting and connecting with customers instead of doing data entry tasks.
Regardless of the industry, CX technology like AI is here to stay. It clearly causes disruption, but the fear of mass-job loss is overblown. AI might do things more than what people can; but the compassion, empathy, and ability to connect with customers are something only humans can do.
This makes the human workforce a more valuable asset to any company.
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