“Hey Siri!”. It is by all means one of our daily conversations… with our phones. Artificial Intelligence (AI), which has been studied for over one hundred years, is now present in every aspect of our life, especially in employment and workplace. Without doubts, AI creates new categories of employment, and lowers costs of many goods and services. On the other hand, it is argued that AI shifts the labour demand and replaces middle-skilled workers. This blog presents the impacts of AI on employment and workplace from the perspective of managers and specialists in Vaasa Region.
Artificial Intelligence is a science and a set of computational technologies that are inspired by – but typically operate quite differently from – the ways people use their nervous systems and bodies to sense, learn, reason, and take action (Stone et al., 2016).
According to the respondents, AI collects and combines information a lot quicker than a human. With AI we can standardize and operate production lines, internet base platforms, sales and purchases. This makes production quicker and data analysis more effective. The growth of AI will challenge competence development and bring new possibilities to employees learning new tasks and therefore focus on another kind of work opportunities.
On the other hand AI can create some uncertainty and insecurity in the changing job markets. Employees can start questioning their value to the company and start to think that their jobs are disappearing because of AI. With AI a big security question is also cyber security and how to protect company secrets. Because everything is online what happens if there is a leak in cyber security? Does it mean that company advantage is gone? AI is a something that does not have feelings so jobs requiring human relationships and understanding is limited to AI ́s understanding and therefor something a robot cannot do.
Positive
- Collect information and integrate information faster than a human
- Analyse data much quicker
- Offer employees new possibilities to learn new tasks
- Standardise many processes
Negative
- Cause insecurity in job markets
- Challenge cyber security safety
- Cannot solve tasks which require soft skills and human relationships
- Take only what is given/said into consideration and miss small things that only humans could take into consideration
What the future holds
At presence, AI is is something that can be found all over Wärtsilä and ABB. One-hand jobs are disappearing, but more jobs are created in the IT and AI industry. AI will affect on customer relationships, b2b relationships and platforms. Because this changing era employees must start to learn more of AI and pay attention to changing details and careers. New technology and ideas are constantly being developed within the companies.
One word that came in up in all of the interviews was the word fast. AI is developing fast and is also making processes faster, sometimes too fast, which has an impact on the employees and the demographics of the workforce. This study has shown that it is important for employees to update their knowledge in a fast-changing environment. If they don’t there is a possibility that they will be replaced with someone younger, due to the younger generation generally having more knowledge about technology and being more adaptable to change.
This blog is an extraction of academic work “Managing Artificial Intelligence Based Innovations” (2019) conducted by Lina Svensson, Amanda Hämäläinen, Frida Lönnbäck, Nguyen Phuong. All rights reserved.
References
Stone, P., Brooks, R., Brynjolfsson, E., Calo, R., Etzioni, O., Hager, G., … & LeytonBrown, K. (2016). Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030. One hundred year study on artificial intelligence: Report of the 2015-2016 Study Panel. Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
PHUONG NGUYEN 