Artificial intelligence is reshaping career advancement opportunities in new and interesting ways. For tech professionals, that means being more analytical. For business leaders, that means being more creative.
There are three types of AI impacts on executive career opportunities:
- AI may promise (or threaten) to reduce the size of the workforce, but it is also creating enormous demand for skilled professionals to design, build, maintain and train AI models and related data. .
- AI may play many decision-making roles, but successful organizations and individuals will apply AI to new business situations, create new markets, disrupt existing markets, and help AI provide jobs. Someone who can provide unprecedented insight. organization and the world.
- AI-enabled organizations are highly automated and may require few employees. But because the cost of entry will be so low, small, agile and entrepreneurial organizations that find new ways to deliver services through AI will thrive.
“Technical professionals will need to pivot their careers into data analytics and programming as the new age of opportunities lies in the areas of machine learning, natural language processing, robotics and artificial intelligence,” said vice president. Director Dharmesh Mistry said. Technology Markets Unit of Capgemini Americas. “At the same time, business-oriented professionals will need to reorient themselves toward creative problem-solving and critical thinking, areas where AI has yet to make significant strides.”
History may be repeating itself. “The jobs lost by these technological breakthroughs will be more than made up by technology-leading roles, functions, and even entire sectors that may or may not exist in the next few years.” Today. says Adam Samples, Atrium’s president of staffing. “Societies evolve. Employers are already showing signs that they are unwilling to take the costs and risks of hiring these categories of people.”
“We need ‘bilingual’ leaders who can speak to both technical and business stakeholders,” said Bjorn Austrath, senior vice president and head of AI acceleration at Truist. Leaders and experts “must be familiar with ‘data science,’” he said. ese” and “executive-ese”. Over-reliance on purely technical skills can lead to disjointed scientific experiments with no clear business benefit, and too much focus on business outcomes can lead to long-term Disruptive innovation can be stifled in the early stages of the data science and model operations lifecycle. “
What skill sets should executives and professionals focus on as they move up the career ladder in the AI era?
- Understand the basics of AI: “Executives don’t have to understand the complexities and inner workings of the AI programs they’re working on, but they do need to understand the basics,” says Andy Thurai, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research. says. For example, he outlines: “What capabilities does the AI program they are considering have? will help.”
- Strengthens critical thinking. In the age of AI, managers need to be adept at “analyzing information and evaluating arguments to make informed decisions,” says Mistry. “This skill is becoming more and more important as the amount of information available in the digital age increases. Being able to filter relevant information out of large amounts of data is a tremendous asset. Newer forms of AI can quickly generate answers based on prompts, but often generate false or outright false statements (hallucinations), and critical thinking is required to analyze truth and falsehood. will be required.”
- Realize that AI is taking on the heavy lifting of low-level tasks. “Between AI and robotics, many of the mundane tasks, and frankly undesirable features of the workplace for the modern generation, have been and will be automated to obscure them,” Sample says. . “Trade accounting, repeatable administrative support functions, and legal support functions are just a few examples among many. I believe we will move to a more focused workplace.”
- Focus on getting more out of your creativity. “As many routine and repetitive tasks become automated, creativity will become an essential skill for managers to differentiate themselves in the job market,” says Mistry. “Furthermore, AI can only build on what it is trained to be, so it cannot be truly creative and come up with truly novel ideas.”
- Estimate your payback and measure your results. AI is no different than any other technology entering the business landscape in that it must bring tangible benefits to the business. “Ask whether AI can solve this particular problem better than the current methods,” Turai says. “Evaluate efficiency, cost and required skills. Ultimately, implementing and maintaining AI is not easy. It must prove worthwhile. The total cost of ownership needs to be justified so that executives can invite the right solution to prove themselves rather than trying ChatGPT for everything.”
The need for very deep technical knowledge of AI or its variations, at least from a business professional’s perspective, is not on this list. “Non-technical business professionals are not expected to know how to build or deploy AI apps,” he says. “However, it is imperative that these professionals understand the basics of AI, its potential applications, knowledge of how to build business cases around AI, and the fundamentals of the technologies involved.”
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