London
CNN
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When a Middle Eastern airline was recently inundated with 16,000 applications for multiple cabin crew positions, the company used artificial intelligence to sift resumes and select the most promising candidates.
An AI-powered chatbot then emailed the form to approximately 1,000 top applicants, further narrowing the list based on their responses to key questions. In the end, fewer than 500 of her applicants, or 3% of him, were interviewed by the company.
What would have taken days for a large HR team to accomplish was accomplished in minutes using AI. The company that developed the software, Recruitment Smart, calls it SniperAI in honor of its speed and accuracy.
From recruiting and real estate to customer service and coding, generative AI — the technology that powers platforms like ChatGPT — is driving incredible productivity gains. A software engineer can now code twice as fast as she normally would, and a researcher can complete her week’s worth of work. In just one morning of his day, 250 people have the job of responding to customer emails.
Recruitment Smart’s SniperAI predates the release of ChatGPT and other consumer generative AI tools.
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ChatGPT is based on so-called generative AI.
“Over the next few years, the main impact AI will have on work will be enabling people to do their jobs more efficiently. MSFT) founder Bill Gates said in a blog post on Tuesday.
Experts say the technology could help deal with the sharp and prolonged slowdown in productivity growth in many Western countries. The slowdown has made it more costly for businesses to keep inflation under control.
“AI has huge potential to improve productivity,” BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said at the company’s investor day last month. “It may be a technology that can control inflation.”
Eric Brynjolfsson, director of the Digital Economy Institute at Stanford University, told CNN that AI could have an impact “as good or even greater” than earlier so-called general-purpose technologies. A very basic input for production. ”
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development said in a report on Tuesday that AI, as the latest general-purpose technology, will impact nearly every sector and profession.
Like the steam engine, which sparked the Industrial Revolution, and electricity, which sparked dramatic advances in manufacturing and telecommunications, AI is “pervasive across many industries, facilitating overall productivity gains. We can,” said the OECD.
Increased output will not come immediately. Slow productivity growth (most commonly measured as gross domestic product per hour worked) has been a drag on many advanced economies since at least the 2008 global financial crisis. The reasons for this include the trend toward an aging population and “deglobalisation”, i.e. the weakening of trade and investment relationships between nations.
Productivity issues are becoming more urgent as the labor market tightens and wages rise.
“If wages rise more than productivity … it will cost more to produce the same amount of output, which could lead to inflation,” David McMillan, professor of finance at the University of Stirling in Scotland, told CNN. Told.
On the other hand, a more productive labor force produces more goods and services at a lower unit cost. “This means that supplies of these things are increasing, which is putting downward pressure on prices and thus leading to lower inflation,” McMillan told The Conversation recently. wrote.
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Commuters crossing the London Bridge in London, England.
Wage growth in the United States and Europe is currently at 5-7%, well above average annual productivity growth, according to official data, and has languished below 1.5% since the mid-2000s.
Ultimately, this is bad news for workers. In a report, the OECD noted the recent decline in workers’ purchasing power as high inflation eroded wages, stating that “in the long run, sustained real wage growth can only come from sustained productivity growth.” I can guarantee it,” he said.
The UK Office for National Statistics has estimated that if productivity continues to grow at 2% per annum between 2012 and 2022, the actual growth rate will not be 0.2%. Around the same time, additional wages of an average of £5,000 ($6,400) per worker per year will be paid.
The only way to increase productivity is to increase the amount of goods and services an economy can produce. That’s where AI comes in.
Today, Wimbledon, the world’s oldest tennis tournament, uses AI tools developed by IBM (IBM) to automatically generate match highlight reels, saving the editorial team tons of time. For the first time this year, the highlights will also include his AI-generated commentary.
This means that tournament organizers can do more with the same number of employees.
AI promises a massive boost to the workforce, potentially making the global economy more capable of producing goods and services, driving down prices and driving wages higher.
“Think of this as akin to the increase in global labor supply after China’s integration into the global trading system,” Neil Shearing, chief economist at Capital Economics Group, said in a note this week. But this time, the software takes on the role of humans.”
In a recent paper, Brynjolfsson, Martin Neal Bailey, Senior Emeritus Fellow of Economic Research at the Brookings Institution, and Anton Korinek, Professor of Economics at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, argue that productivity growth in the United States The growth rate is expected to double from the previous year. Thanks to AI, his next decade returned to the levels of his 1990s and early 2000s, when the United States experienced a computer productivity boom.
Brynjolfsson told CNN that the same could be true in Europe, albeit at slightly smaller productivity gains.
Already, companies including IBM, Microsoft, Google (GOOG) and many smaller competitors such as SAP (SAP) and Salesforce (CRM) are used by millions of businesses and employees worldwide. are competing to integrate this technology into their own products. Microsoft describes it as having a “Copilot” to power your work.
Widespread adoption of AI-powered tools could increase global GDP by 7%, or $7 trillion Goldman Sachs researchers say productivity growth will improve by 1.5 percentage points over a decade.
In some cases, productivity gains may be achieved as soon as you can. The reason, Brynjolfsson said, is that most generative AI tools will be on the internet, “technology that’s already on our desks,” and will be widely accessible.
AI is also very user-friendly as it basically only needs what the user can do. speaking and writing.
“For both of these reasons,” Brynjolfsson said, “this AI revolution will be much more condensed than previous milestones, such as the invention of electricity, which took decades to transform the economy. I expect it will,” he said. “It will be years, maybe months, not decades.”
