AI Is Transforming Industry Even As Risks Increase

The general news coverage of artificial intelligence (AI) often focuses on how it is changing work and the workplace. In this New York Times feature they talk about how software engineering jobs are being replaced by AI. How 92% of professionals working in technology today need to gain AI skills or lose their job. Forbes even ranked jobs across all industries and predicted which will be replaced first – it’s bad news for translators, check-out assistants, and customer service employees.

My view is that some industries will change completely, but we often talk about jobs instead of tasks. AI can’t immediately replace humans so the media should stop talking about entire jobs vanishing and think more carefully about the types of work where AI can help humans to be more productive.

Some commentators are looking beyond these obvious points though. A thoughtful study published by the MIT Technology Review suggested that humans might become too attached to their AI assistants – even to the point of preferring their company to other humans.

Replika is one example of this. The system was created by a software engineer a few months after one of her friends died. She fed the system with thousands of emails and text messages to teach it about her friend and ultimately she could chat to her friend once again – at least chat to an AI simulation. Now Replika is available to anyone who wants to remember a loved one by talking to them once again.

The MIT study suggests that digital assistants will soon become commonplace in our personal and work life. We are already seeing this in many fields. Customer service agents, those that have not been replaced by AI, are still finding that they don’t need to categorize calls or write up notes – their digital assistant will do all of that work.

AI boyfriends and girlfriends are also already on offer. So if you just want the ability to talk to someone who always seems to understand you, never argues, and their avatar makes them look incredible then you can have an AI partner in your personal life and an AI assistant at work.

This fear of addiction is very real. We are all becoming more exposed to AI on a daily basis and the positive experiences will feel very positive – almost too good to be true.

But none of this is a reason for executives to fear AI. There are many different corporate solutions that are directly benefiting from AI without involving vast job losses or relationships with bots. McKinsey has documented five of the most common opportunities:

1. Scheduling: whether you need to plan trucking logistics or plan a factory manufacturing line, AI can study all the options and offer suggestions to improve efficiency.
2. Knowledge discovery: when you are overwhelmed with so much data on your customers, products, and suppliers, how can you determine which data is important information? AI can mine into the data and find relationships that are invisible to the human eye.
3. Product system design: a modern airplane can include many millions of dependent parts. It’s incredibly hard for engineers to plan improvements when they don’t know how a change in one place will negatively affect performance somewhere else. AI can model the entire product and suggest improvements.
4. Performance optimization: Computer aided engineering has improved product design, but a product containing hundreds of parts with dozens of options of configuration options for each part will soon have millions of potential settings. AI can run the simulations using all combinations and options and suggest constant improvement ideas.
5. Root cause analysis: when a problem is reported, what is the real cause of that issue? How can the problem itself be treated, rather than just the visible symptom? AI can explore options and suggest scenarios to test to determine the root cause of any product failure.

AI coverage in the media has focused on job replacement and chatbots, but there is a genuine opportunity for a revolution in industrial productivity and efficiency. Smart executives will be exploring these ideas and ignoring most of the coverage in the general news media.

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