Arvind Krishna is the Chairman and CEO of IBM. Stefan Verms – Bloomberg – Getty Images
The impact of artificial intelligence is being felt in various industries and workplaces around the world. As companies look for ways to use this powerful technology to deliver better results, they need to start preparing their workforce for collaboration with AI tools.
Tools like DALL-E and ChatGPT have captured the public’s imagination, but the real question is whether AI is ready to actually transform the enterprise.
The answer is yes. Many companies believe it happens in two different ways. AI you can trust to help automate routine business processes, and AI that acts as a creative partner to drive innovation.
Today, AI solutions are deployed across enterprises to help tackle the kinds of tasks most people find repetitive. This frees up employees to work on higher-value work. We’ve experienced this first-hand with IBM’s HR team.
Recruiting, promoting and retaining talent should be a priority for all companies, regardless of size. Much of this work involves bringing together large amounts of data and documents for standardized processes such as promotion cycles. With the help of IBM’s own AI, they are beginning to automate key steps in what used to be a highly manual process. Within IBM, piloting this technology has allowed him to shift his 700 professionals doing relatively manual-type jobs in HR to fewer than 50 of his. This has freed up so many people to spend more time on important HR tasks. Services that require thinking and creativity rather than routine paperwork, such as career guidance or manager support.
Outside of our own organizations, AI continues to offer significant competitive advantages. With digital labor solutions, companies cut his processing time by 60%, he answers hundreds of thousands of questions every month with 95% accuracy, and there are cases where he spends up to 75% less time searching for information. increase.
Of course, today’s AI is not only about automating repetitive tasks. Much of the recent excitement around generative AI has focused on its ability to compose text and save time on everything from composing emails to creating sales presentations. But humans are also partnering with AI to drive innovation.
Consider molecular production. There are millions, if not billions, of potential ways to join molecules. Even with the world’s most powerful supercomputers, it’s virtually impossible for scientists to simulate these combinations with existing technology. Generative AI can help advance this work, which is at the heart of world-changing processes such as discovering new drugs and building more efficient batteries for electric vehicles. As these new molecules are modeled with the help of AI, humans with their domain-specific knowledge will play a key role in choosing the best path.
Companies must prepare their workforce for these new applications of AI. This means that human expertise and knowledge of complex processes (such as bringing a new drug to market) must be combined with AI tools to reach goals faster than ever before. It also means equipping people with the right skills to work creatively and responsibly with AI.
Not all employees will have to learn how to code, but most will have to familiarize themselves with new AI solutions. At the same time, companies need to think systematically about how to move AI-free people from routine tasks into more fulfilling and business-impacting roles. In this way, infusing AI throughout a company’s workflow will not only drive new insights and innovation, but also lead to higher employee satisfaction and productivity.
The backbone of any new technology is trust. Despite recent innovations, AI still faces major hurdles. AI is error-prone, confidently generating plausible but incorrect responses, and can even be tricked into ignoring programmed constraints and performing potentially harmful actions.
Customers and governments expect companies to provide the highest standards of security, privacy, data protection and compliance. Companies need clarity on how their AI systems are trained, what data is used in that training, and what the AI system’s recommendations include. Developing responsible and ethical AI requires eliminating the possibility of human bias.
People working with trustworthy AI will transform our economy and society. The use of AI is projected to bring about $16 trillion in productivity by 2030. Now is the time for us to embrace that partnership and prepare our workforce for all that AI has to offer.
Arvind Krishna is the Chairman and CEO of IBM.
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