As the editor of the technology section of The Philippine STAR, I’ve been making purposeful efforts to demystify the “doom and gloom” narrative predicted by futurists on how AI will steal your job. I’ve previously discussed this with IBPAP’s Jack Madrid, to get a pulse of the Philippine BPO industry and its challenges. I also discussed the impact of AI with actual industry practitioners especially in the fields of ecommerce, education, human resources, and the creative sector during PhilSTAR NEXT’s recently concluded Future Proof Summit 2024.
It is the second week of November 2024 and I am finding myself nestled in the picturesque island of Boracay attending VST ECS’s CXO Tech Summit, a yearly gathering of IT professionals, chief experience officers, and enterprise customers of VST ECS, perhaps the largest distributor of IT solutions in the country – from consumer level laptops, to AI cloud solutions, and even to mobility solutions. I cannot help but feel a bit of anxiety as this trip coincides with three typhoons that consecutively battered the country. The first one hit the day before I left for my trip and the second one is scheduled to arrive a day after this trip. Fortuitous for those in attendance, but perhaps not so much for the rest of the country when looking at the bigger picture. And I realized that this was a weirdly apt analogy to the huge disruptions that AI will cause in the workforce: the storms are here, and I guess so is AI.
I believe the doomsday scenario comes from data from the World Economic Forum that states how AI is replacing 85 million jobs globally. But it will also create 70 million jobs. The question is: Are you part of the 15 million difference? By 2030, 14% of employees globally may need to change careers. Whether it is a lateral movement or a retooling or upskilling, new jobs would include AI Ethicists, AI Climate Change Analysts, AI Urban Planners, AI Linguists … the list goes on. You get the drift. There will be some form of AI in everything and if you are not using this tech in some form at work, your performance will suffer.
After attending a number of these AI forums and also after having heard from AI business suppliers this week, I have a more tempered and nuanced approach to AI, which I summarize here:
First and foremost, AI is a tool. Chefs don’t cook with dull knives and photographers cannot take pictures with broken cameras. It’s the same with AI. In the hands of a bad photographer, a camera will take bad to average photos. In the same light, an unprompted ChatGPT output will give you very generic grade school-level results.
With all things constant, the person who can use AI tools will be more efficient at work than the other one who won’t. Perhaps your job won’t be affected in the long run, but the smarter worker will have more quality time to spend doing other things. It is industries where efficiency and productivity are tantamount (like 5% YOY increase in productivity) such as banks where this will be felt the most.
A multi-disciplined person (also known as a hyphenate) will have a better understanding of AI tools and how it can contribute to work. Knowing the right combination of skills and AI tools (we discovered a lot during this event) will make for a more productive and well-rounded person. It isn’t about taking away humanity from AI or the fear of adopting AI. At the very center is still the person.
In his opening remarks, Jimmy Go, President and CEO of VST ECS Philippines said that “our industry is undergoing fundamental change. Seismic change. Tectonic change. The AI revolution is bigger than the PC invention or the Internet revolution. In the past 30 years, Moore’s law has doubled the number of transistors or the speed of our CPU but now it has reached its boundaries. AI is transforming the way we do things faster and more intelligently.”
AI as a tool is different from other disciplines, because it has the capacity to influence culture. In the same way that social media does not discriminate on age, financial status, or race, AI can be the next great equalizer if put to proper use.
