The technology world is abuzz with the promise and peril of artificial intelligence. Many questions are being asked, not the least of which is “What does this technology mean for IT talent?” As AI capabilities grow, there are fears that the answer is job loss. Why pay people when AI systems can do the same job faster and for much less cost?
That fear is not entirely unfounded. In May, A.I. 3,900 jobs cutAccording to a report by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement firm.
While this statistic is surprising, it doesn't necessarily portend a longer-term trend: the inevitable advancement of AI systems will gobble up IT jobs whole. New technologies also create demand for new skills and new roles.
“The job you do in IT today may not be the same job you'll do tomorrow, but I don't think I've ever seen such a shift in human skills that there's less work to be done down the road.” Neal Katz, Co-Founder and COO Eye Levelhelps companies build applications that leverage LLM, told InformationWeek.
So how will AI change the way IT jobs work, what functions will AI replace humans, and what role will humans assume as AI evolves?
Jobs expected to be dominated by AI
Simple, repetitive tasks are the first areas where AI is being applied. Basic data entry and processing functions are likely candidates. Similarly, entry-level IT helpdesk and support roles that are familiar with automation may also see further transfer from human workers to AI.
“We're looking now at places in the workplace where we can automate, places where we don't need customer support people,” said Christine Hales, vice president of human resources. partnerChannel management solutions provider.
Entry-level jobs aren't the only jobs that will be transformed by the increased adoption of AI: software developers may find some of their most common tasks become the purview of AI.
“It's basically replacing everything that a college computer science student is asked to do that they don't want to do: documenting code, writing unit tests, debugging, etc.” Smith OSAI operating system.
AI may eventually take over writing simple code, changing what it means to be a junior engineer or developer. “I don’t think it means you’ll be writing less code, I think it’ll just change the code you write,” Katz said.
While AI will be expected to take over more tasks, the people who previously performed those tasks will not necessarily become irrelevant, but they will be expected to take on new roles.
“You're not necessarily replacing people, you're changing how people behave. It allows you to handle more complex and unique scenarios.” “We're seeing a lot of growth in the technology sector,” said Christine Livingston, managing director and head of artificial intelligence and IoT at management consulting firm Infosys. Protiviti.
AI expands jobs and skills
In July, Netflix made headlines with a job ad for an AI product manager. What's the salary? Up to $900,000Not all jobs requiring AI talent will command such salaries, but more jobs will be needed to keep up with the technology.
Dennis Perpetua, VP and CTO of Digital Workplace Services Kindrillan IT infrastructure services company, points out that new technologies often come with a hype cycle. “Generative AI is new, but AI is not new,” he explains. “When AI started to be deployed at scale, there was a lot of pressure to say, 'This is going to solve all our problems.'”
While generative AI can solve many problems, the job market will see a growing demand for what Perpetua calls “great fundamentals.” “AI is not a panacea for poor information design and poor data structures in companies,” he says.
As more data is fed into large language models (LLMs), knowledge base managers and data scientists will become essential roles for companies. “It's still garbage in, garbage out,” Katz says. “As AI takes over more of our jobs in the future, what you feed it will be more important than ever.”
De Ridder predicts that prompt engineering will emerge as a key skill within the IT field, rather than a standalone job, and he points to agent engineers and multi-agent engineers as new jobs that could emerge from the AI boom.
Agent engineers maintain and coordinate AI agent processes, while multi-agent systems engineers act as project managers overseeing complex processes and outcomes supported by multiple AI agents. According to De Ridder, these jobs have a myriad of specializations linked to different disciplines.
As AI use cases proliferate, IT workers will likely be seen as co-pilots for AI. How will they work with this technology to improve productivity and how will they oversee AI capabilities to ensure desired outcomes?
“I don't think AI is going to take humans out of the loop anytime soon. What AI is going to do in the market is essentially equip the top 10% of people in any industry to work much more efficiently than they ever could before. So it's not going to replace entire jobs,” de Ridder argues. “It's going to replace people who aren't good at the job.”
The need for constant monitoring of humans is likely to give rise to jobs focused on AI outcomes. Katz said of possible jobs in AI performance monitoring: “What are these language models actually doing? What's going on under the hood? I think latent space researchers are going to be an incredible new field.”
While many companies are able to hire and develop AI talent in-house, there's also room for third-party support in this area: “You could think of an AI consultant role that can help guide your business on how to use AI to solve specific problems or improve processes,” says Hales.
Ethical development and use is a hot topic in the AI discussion, and Hales predicts there will be an increased demand for experts who focus on issues like bias, especially as regulation tightens, and companies may seek roles like AI compliance officers.
How IT talent can prepare
This year has been a period of research and piloting of generative AI solutions, according to Livingston. “If we continue down a typical path, 2024 is likely to be the year of adoption,” he said. “We're certainly going to need resources of a different scale to be able to support and sustain that.”
IT talent can be prepared to meet accelerating demand for resources, with many employers now looking to upskill their current IT employees.
“I think people are asking the engineers they currently employ to upskill as quickly as possible and learn what they can do with law degrees and new technologies. And I think that ultimately needs to lead to new specialties that don't exist today,” Katz says.
IT is a technology field that always demands continuous learning from employees, and AI is the next frontier. You'll have the opportunity to try out readily available AI tools like GitHub Copilot, Google Bard, ChatGPT, and more.
“Get hands-on with the technology. Understand how it works. Figure out how you can use this technology to optimize your day-to-day operations. There's no substitute for real, hands-on experience,” Livingston says.
While strengthening your technical skillset is important, Hales urges IT workers not to forget the importance of soft skills: “Communication, teamwork and leadership will continue to be important. Those are things that AI can't deliver, but humans can still deliver,” she explains.
Because the field of generative AI is still new and changing rapidly, learning on the job can be difficult — going back to school for formal, structured training isn't an option yet — but in some ways, that difficulty creates a more level playing field for people working in the IT industry.
“The time to start is now. Everyone feels empowered to make new leaps, changes and transformations in their careers,” Katz says.
