30/06/2019 Artificial Intelligence: the impact on employment and the workforce

Arti cial Intelligence: the impact on

employment and the workforce
How is AI replacing jobs? Which roles and industries will
be most impacted? How can societies get prepared?

George Krasadakis Follow

Jan 17, 2018 · 5 min read

image: pixabay

Although Artificial Intelligence dramatically improves our world in

many ways, there are notable concerns regarding the forthcoming
impact of A.I. on employment and the workforce.

There are predictions talking about millions of unemployed people in

the next decades — primarily due to the impact of Intelligent
Automation and A.I. systems.

In any case, the entire socioeconomic system is entering a phase of

accelerating transformation: markets, businesses, education,
government, social welfare, and employment models will be severely
impacted.

Tasks, Roles, and Jobs at risk

Tasks that are monotonous, can be easily automated; this can
gradually make certain roles obsolete. For instance, tasks and activities

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related to customer care/call center operation, document classi cation,

discovery and retrieval, content moderation are more and more based on
technology and automation and less on human work. The same is true
for roles related to operation and support of production lines and
factories: humans are being replaced by smart robots that can safely
navigate the space, find and move objects (such as products, parts or
tools) or perform complex assembling operations.

A.I. proves to be very effective in handling even more complex activities

— those requiring processing of multiple signals, data streams and
accumulated knowledge in real time. A characteristic case is the
autonomous vehicles that can capture and ‘understand’ the
environment and its dynamics; they can ‘see’, decide and act in real-
time, towards well-defined optimization objectives.

Sectors that will be impacted

Transportation is already in a transformation mode — fully
autonomous cars will be soon a reality — and they will be safer, more
efficient and more effective. Professional drivers (taxi, trucks and
more) will see the demand for their skill set dropping rapidly.

Electronic commerce will also undergo a significant transformation:

fulfillment centers will be fully automated, with robots navigating the
space to collect products and execute customer orders; to be then sent
or even delivered to customers, also automatically, with autonomous
drones and/or cars. The importance of salespersons and networks of
physical stores will shrink; we are close to scenarios where consumer
A.I. agents negotiate with Retailer AI agents — based on different
objectives, tactics, and strategies.

Even more traditional professions which are built on top of strong

human relationships, such as legal professions, will be significantly
impacted: typical support services in a legal context, have to do with
document handling -classi cation, discovery, summarization,
comparison, knowledge extraction and management — tasks where AI
agents can do a great job already.

Financial services, Insurance and any other sector requiring a

significant amount of data processing and content handling will also
benefit from A.I. And of course states, governance, and social
mechanisms — A.I. can have a great role in eliminating bureaucracy,
improving the service to citizens, along with the design and
performance of social programs.

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How Artificial Intelligence can replace human work —

an example
Imagine a typical customer care department: tens or even hundreds
of specialized employees working with a shared mission: to handle
customer requests, complaints, asks, etc. in the best possible way.

The workstream of ‘handling a customer request in the best possible way’

can be broken down in separated jobs which are repeated over time and
across different types of requests, for instance: customer identi cation,
customer history retrieval, request understanding and classi cation,
problem identi cation and mapping to a solution space, forwarding or
escalating to another team, customer document retrieval and finally the
decisioning based on the suitable corporate policy.

All the above can be covered with increased effectiveness from A.I.
algorithms — they prove to be faster, more accurate, reliable and cheaper
than the corresponding team of humans. A properly trained A.I.
system can understand customer requests in natural language,
identify the mentioned or implied entities (for instance, which product
or service the request refers to); it can estimate customer’s intent early
enough (for example, to activate a service or ask for help); it can
instantly process large volumes of data and apply the corporate policy
in order to identify the best action/ decision for the particular case; the
decision can then be communicated to the customer in natural
language.

The system also knows early enough if it can handle the request with
con dence or not; in the latter case, it knows where to redirect the
request as an exception, for a human team to handle it. And all these, in
milliseconds, as part of a chat or voice session between the
customer and companies’ agent.

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This technological solution requires just a small percentage of the

human team that a traditional customer care department has. And
while this hybrid system is in operation, the A.I. component learns
from the exceptions it forwards to the human team to handle,
leading to a continuous improvement of its performance. This feedback
loop will eventually minimize the need for human intervention,
making the AI system autonomous.

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Getting ready
In the long run, we will witness certain roles and jobs becoming less
and less relevant, and finally obsolete. But, in most of the cases,
Artificial Intelligence will have a supportive role to humans —
empowering the human factor to perform better in handling
complex and critical situations which require judgment and creative
thinking. In parallel, there would be numerous new roles and
specialties with a focus on technology and science. For example, there
will be needs for highly skilled professionals to oversee or manage or
coordinate the training of complex Arti cial Intelligence systems; to
ensure their integrity, security, objectivity and proper use.

Under certain assumptions, and following the initial disruption due

to technological unemployment, the AI revolution will lead to a new
era of prosperity, creativeness, and well-being. Humans will no more
need to perform routine, limited value, jobs. The workforce and the
underlying employment models will move from long-term, full-time
employment agreements, to exible, selective premium services o erings.

There will be a stream of new business opportunities

empowering a culture of entrepreneurship,
creativeness and innovation.

The above positive scenario requires a common, shared understanding of

the technology, its opportunities, and its risks. Societies need to adapt to

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the new technology landscape, become more exible and also inherit an
attitude of lifelong learning, collaboration, innovation, and
entrepreneurship.

States need a new strategy with a focus on education; they need to

rethink how markets, companies and employment agreements should
work in the new era of intelligent automation; they need to redesign
the social mechanisms to cover a range of new scenarios and situations.

At an even higher level, we need a solid framework to avoid the

unbalanced concentration of technology power and control.

. . .

Check also: What’s next on AI, AR, VR, NUI, Robotics, Data &
Visualization, Blockchain

Arti cial Intelligence: beyond the hype

How is Arti cial Intelligence impacting our world?

What are the risks and how can we get prepared?
hackernoon.com

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