By Adam Blair, Executive Editor
Artificial
intelligence (AI) is threatening/promising to remake the world’s workforce, and
the retail industry will not be spared. (Nor will journalism, for that matter.)
The futurists, analysts, brand and CPG executives who spoke at the ai.now
workshop sponsored by Fractal Analytics, held July 18
in New York City, shared an over-arching warning: If your workload is
data-driven and/or highly repetitive, a combination of AI and robotics could
make your job obsolete.
One
of the simplest examples is in health care: Nurses and primary care physicians who
interact with patients are more likely to stay employed compared to
radiologists, who examine X-rays for tumors and other health issues. Image
recognition solutions powered by machine learning can be trained to review
these X-rays, and they can examine many more than a human doctor ever could —
and in some cases with greater accuracy.
The
future isn’t exactly the bleak dystopia of the Terminator movies, however, even if the keynote by futurist Martin
Ford was titled Rise
of the Robots. Ford, author of a book of the same name, provided
data that revealed how much the world of work has already changed due to changes
in information technology. “New industries are not labor intensive,” said Ford,
making the following comparison:
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•
In 1979, General Motors generated $11 billion in earnings (measured in 2012
dollars) and employed 840,000 workers;
•
In 2012, Google generated $14 billion in earnings, 20% more than G.M., but employed only 38,000 workers — 4.5% of G.M.’s workforce at its peak.
“Since
the 1960s, each succeeding decade has produced fewer new jobs (by percentage),”
Ford noted. “There has been a hollowing out of the job market, and that’s
almost certainly a result of technology.”
White-collar
jobs are not exempt from these trends, Ford added: “In 2004, the median
staffing of a corporate finance department was 120 full-time employees for each $1 billion in revenue,” he said.
“By 2014 it was down to 71.26 employees.
In journalism, the development of smart algorithms can tap into a stream of
data, find the most interesting elements and create an article. One of these is
published approximately every 30 seconds.”
People Skills
Will Save People’s Jobs
Retail
jobs that require complex human interactions — a sales associates helping a customer
find the right product, for example — are less likely to be usurped by AI-powered
technologies. “Human-to-human interaction is still a critical skill,” said
Matthew Keylock, Head of Data and Analytics for Connected Solutions at Mars
Petcare. He added that AI solutions rely on data, and lots of it, to function,
and “there’s so little of context that can be captured in a data form, so
understanding relationships and their context will still be important.”
People
who can understand what’s happening inside the “black box” of an AI-powered
solution also will remain employable. “With AI, governance is key,” said
Keylock, noting that existing cognitive biases can affect how an AI/machine
learning solution develops. “Companies need not only technical experts but also
business translators, and those can be harder to find than the technical
people. You don’t want an [AI solution] to run riot where you don’t know what’s
happening with it minute to minute.”
How AI And
Humans Can Work Together
Many
AI-based solutions can serve as tools that improve a human’s ability to do his
or her job. For example, “If you’re a typical customer service rep, you’re not
set up well to succeed,” said Kjell Carlsson, a Senior Analyst at Forrester. “The
economics of call centers means you aren’t paid very much, and you have no
information about the person calling in or the types of things they are calling
about.”
With
an AI-powered “listening agent” capable of voice recognition and sentiment
analysis monitoring the calls coming in, however, “the solution could present
10 likely options for what the call is about,” said Carlsson. “Then the human
can quickly identify the one that is likeliest.”
Companies
may be tempted to do a full rip-and-replace of their customer service apparatus
and replace humans with chatbots, “but if you start with the perspective of
augmenting someone that is already doing this job, it’s easier to make
headway,” Carlsson noted. “If you can make a person just slightly more
efficient, you can measure that. However, the sexiness of full automation and a
soothing voice coming from the black box are the AI applications that get all
the attention.”
One
final note: This article was not
written by a robot — but if it was, would you be certain that you could tell
the difference?
