Artificial Intelligence challenge – future “SMART “work force

Abstract

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) challenge will change the workforce practices in the future. Humans need to meet the challenges of AI and automation. This post looks into the skill sets challenges that the futuristic human worker will face to work and compete.

Main Body

A World Bank report published in 2015 indicated that a sizeable number of jobs would cease to exist with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Former world chess champion Gary Kasparov, who famously played against the IBM machine Deep Blue in the 90`s, has claimed, in a recent Ted talk event on “Artificial Intelligence’, that human behaviour and work practices need to adapt so that with, machines becoming more and more intelligent, humans and machines can co-exist rather than compete. An October`15 HBR article “How smart and connected products are transforming companies” by Michael Porter and James Heppelmann states, that in the future networked and data-driven world, most of the manufacturing firms will have to change from the traditional organizational structures to a revised structures wherein IT and data would be the fabric. Data flow, supported by IT tools, from both external and internal sources would drive analytics which in turn would give deeper business and customer insights. An another interesting trend that will be seen is “Uberization of workforce” where workers will be chosen from a pool for specific activities matching their skill sets, on a project to project basis, like we take an uber cab ride.

AI presents a huge challenge to the workforce and firms in terms of skill sets, training, and education and importantly a different set of soft skills and work practices. This leads to the important question – what are the skill sets required for both white and blue collared workers in the new age wherein humans will have to co –exist with machines? Workers will need to compete and co-exist not only with their colleagues but also with machines which probably is at a remote location in some other part of the world but also work in different organization structures as pointed out by Porter and Heppelmann.

We will see a workplace where, as a division of work between machines and humans, machines will take away a bulk part of the operational work due to their higher speed and efficiency and hence pressure will be on the human workforce will be add more value through innovation, lateral thinking and adding a more humane touch. The human workforce will also need a different team working skills to co-exist in an ecosystem of machines and humans.

These challenges lead to the regular question – how are the education systems of today preparing the workforce to address the challenges of the workplace of tomorrow especially at the schools level. The Finnish government has redesigned their schooling education system where, rather than studying subjects, the school children work together as a group and discuss relevant topics. This helps not only in understanding the topics but also build team skills, co-learning and sharing activities.

Thus the future workspace will see a combination of humans and machines in which the human workers using their co-machine workers as a platform to innovate and reduce time to produce results with better speed and efficiency. Traditional organizational structures will be broken down and new and flexible structures will be in place. The future workspace is a challenging place where different skill sets will be required and human workers need to be more “SMARTER” than today to face the machines challenge. Interesting world indeed!!