For the next several months, I'm going to be featuring a "Future of..." series I'm working on with ManpowerGroup as part of its new Global Insights team.
Within the next five years, we anticipate that the democratization of AI-based technology will lead to greater accessibility across the organization and that employees at all levels will be empowered to integrate AI into relevant job tasks as they see fit.
As we discussed in “The Age of Adaptability” report, businesses anticipate a 23% churn in jobs over the next five years between the creation of new roles and the reduction of others. But, because more cross-industry examples will emerge detailing how best to deploy AI, organizations won’t be as mystified by its presence and impact on the workforce. AI will increasingly be seen as a force for good!
One might imagine that a futurist has extreme ideas about the future of AI. And while it’s true that I believe AI-based technologies will be true partners in work moving forward and will play a role in the development of the metaverse and immersive work environments that Manpower recently researched, I don’t think the AI of science fiction is likely to come to fruition anytime soon. We are still far from achieving what’s called artificial general intelligence, which is a form of AI that thinks and creates on its own, essentially surpassing human abilities in all types of work.
Since AI-based technologies are not in a position to take over all human jobs as is still feared, this piece will focus on the technologies that are available now – namely generative AI applications and talent intelligence applications – and the role they can realistically play in the workforce in the coming years.
Generative AI Has Legs, But It’s Not the End
Generative AI is capable of generating text, images, or other media by learning the patterns and structure of input training data and then generating new data that has similar characteristics. A workforce-related example involves the development of sophisticated digital assistants that can use an existing arsenal of HR information to respond more accurately to online employee queries, even if they weren’t trained on those exact questions.
The technology has been introduced to the market at a very rapid pace. ChatGPT was released in November of 2022, and then shortly thereafter, OpenAI released a large language model called GPT-4 that was a measurable improvement over the original ChatGPT. Microsoft, Google, and other big technology players are quickly getting in on the action.
But generative AI is not necessarily the massive breakthrough people think it is. Its release is more the result of a logical linear progression, as we’ve had smart chatbots for quite some time now. Although there has been significant media interest in ChatGPT, it’s not substantially different from what came before. In its current state, generative AI still requires a great deal of human oversight and regulation, and the majority of organizations are just figuring out how to use it effectively for various business purposes. So, if you haven’t cracked the code yet, you shouldn’t lose sleep over it. You’re not behind.
For the rest of this piece, head over to the ManpowerGroup's Global Insights blog.
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