How AI impacts employees over the coming months depends on how well employers equip workers with the knowledge they need to use it to its full potential.
You would want to have been living under a rock for the entirety of the past year not to know that AI is the most talked about technology trend. That is something that will continue into 2024, too, and more than likely for many years after that.
Of course, one of the areas most profoundly affected by AI advancements is work. A survey by Deloitte from late last year showed that more than 300,000 Irish people used AI in the workplace. But digging deeper into the survey’s findings revealed that most workers had tried it only once or twice and that it was a much smaller portion of workers who used AI every day.
Workers’ AI knowledge has been found wanting
The survey suggested that while lots of workers are aware of AI, not many know how it can help or hinder them. SiliconRepublic.com heard from several industry insiders, who gave their predictions on how they think the ‘AI revolution’ will pan out for workers over the next few months. Most of these industry professionals believe AI will have a broadly positive impact on employees, but there is also ample evidence that AI can be a double-edged sword.
For example, during our chat last year with Brian Sathianathan of software company Iterate.ai, he said workers who aren’t equipped with the skills to use AI might find their jobs “more vulnerable to being automated”.
He encouraged workers to get educated about how AI can benefit and harm them, because if they aren’t they risk being left behind. That said, Sathianathan believes AI presents a lot of opportunities to workers who know how to avail of them.
A productivity revolution driven by AI in 2024
Chris Clark, a solutions engineer at Slack, agrees with the cautiously optimistic approach to AI. For AI cheerleaders, increased productivity is a major reason for adoption as AI – particularly copilot tools that can do the mundane admin tasks workers don’t want to do.
“In 2024, we will continue to live through not just an AI revolution, but a productivity revolution,” says Clark. “What’s more, workers are seeing how the two go hand in hand, thanks to positively impacting and augmenting their potential at work on a day-to-day basis.”
He points to a statistic from recent Slack research that showed 90pc of workers globally who use AI are more likely to report higher levels of productivity than those who have not adopted AI.
Complacency
Despite knowing its productivity benefits, Clark is not an AI cheerleader. He has reservations about how the tech will be used – particularly around trust.
“Organisations need to keep trust front of mind to avoid putting their business at risk; any decision that is unknowingly based on incorrect or outdated information – or even a hallucination – could have far-reaching and unintended consequences. Any AI should therefore be based on trusted information with citations so sources can be verified.”
Clark’s words are a reminder that tech is built by people, who are fallible, and therefore it is not 100pc reliable. Workers need to be aware of that and use AI with a little bit of cynicism or due diligence – that requires them to have knowledge and skills in AI. We can expect to hear a lot more about this issue in 2024.
Employers must keep valuing their people
According to Sara Gutierrez, chief science officer at SHL, employers need to invest in their human talent as they will be key to helping businesses navigate the AI revolution. However, she believes the employment market going into 2024 has shifted in favour of the employer, which means they may start taking their people for granted.
“Although we saw economic struggles coming out of the pandemic, we also witnessed the most buoyant job market in recent history. This led to the Great Resignation, with employees having agency and power and employers having to work hard to attract and retain talent. The result: higher starting salaries, greater flexibility, more work life-balance and so on.
“That pendulum has shifted. A tight labour market and less opportunity, coupled with job insecurity and a cost-of-living crisis means that employers are back in the driving seat,” Gutierrez says.
“While it might be tempting for organisations to pull back from employee-oriented initiatives, such action will be short-sighted,” she warns. “Organisations that continue to invest in their people, offering development, mobility and career growth in 2024 will reap the rewards in the months and years to come.”
Employers are still learning about AI, too
Doug Dennerline, CEO of Betterworks, is giving employers the benefit of the doubt regarding the ongoing refinement of their AI strategies. As he points out, it has only been a year since ChatGPT was introduced to the market, and “2024 will be the year that businesses begin to sharpen their strategies around it”.
So, like workers, employers themselves are only just getting to grips with AI, he says. Like Clark, he recognises that the “efficiency gains are clear” and he contradicts somewhat the findings of the Irish Deloitte survey, saying “employees across all industries quickly caught on to the fact that services like ChatGPT have value beyond functioning like a sophisticated search engine”.
“I think in the coming year, we’ll see more and more C-suites stepping up and embracing the opportunity to not only help their employees be more productive with AI but harness its power to build more equitable and fair experiences, both in the workplace and for customers.”
Dennerline’s positivity is echoed by plenty of others. Even people like Gutierrez and Clark, who have reservations about AI’s impact on workers, know that it has great potential to assist workers in industries from marketing to healthcare – provided they know how to use it, of course.
In the end, it all depends on people
Adit Jain, CEO of LeenaAI, says AI’s potential as an asset for creative workers will be recognised in 2024. “Generative AI can act as a powerful ally, significantly reducing the burden of mundane administrative duties that often consume substantial amounts of an employee’s workday. With generative AI handling the time-consuming and arduous parts of the job, employees can fully unleash their creative potential.”
Jain adds that workers should capitalise on their “unique human capabilities, such as intuition, empathy and imagination” to “truly drive the success of their respective organisations”. However, as Gutierrez says, employers need to take the initiative and keep upskilling workers so they can do just that. The answer to the question of how AI will affect the employee experience over the coming year really depends on one thing: people.
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