Don’t let Negative Stories Distract you from AI Opportunities.

?Stories about how AI threatens jobs are everywhere today. There is a new one almost every week.? These gloomy tales likely play heavily in the minds of the millions of workers laid off in recent months.

However, the negative news often misses a crucial point: technology innovation, including AI, actually drives job growth!

History redux?

Today’s negative AI news reminds me of 1983, when, as a division manager in a large telecom company, I told my staff we were being issued new IBM personal computers.

I was a bit surprised when they didn’t jump for joy.

After the meeting, one person came into my office, closed the door, and said with teary eyes, “Some team members are afraid that computer science will become a job requirement.” She added, “We are not engineers with high-tech skills.”

After a moment, I said, “Yes, you’ll need to learn to use PCs.” But I quickly added, "I don’t know how to use a computer either, so we’ll learn together.”

In time, my team learned how to use their PCs, not as engineers but as marketing, sales, and customer service professionals. They learned to use new computer applications for research, messaging, proposals, spreadsheets, and other business purposes. Computer applications and business skills, not computer science, transformed our jobs and how we did business.

As far as I know, none of my team was ever fired because they couldn’t use a?computer.

AI is one of the most incredible opportunities of our generation!

Market and economic statistics about AI's explosive growth are easily found and become outdated within a few weeks. The AI gold rush started with Open AI's Chat GPT in November 2022. By October 2024, ChatGPT reported almost 200 million weekly users worldwide.

AI platforms have mushroomed as organizations of all sizes produce increasingly more powerful versions with incredible capabilities to solve sophisticated scientific and technical challenges.

However, much faster than PC applications have grown since the ‘80s, AI applications are springing up everywhere, for businesses, education, healthcare, government, and individuals. For example, a website named Listedai.co?already catalogs almost 4,000 AI applications.

Yet recent studies say that less than half of users have tried ChatGTP, and more than 50% of knowledge workers don’t know how to use AI!

Back to the future.

In the 1980s, people were concerned that the PC revolution would threaten their jobs. In truth, introducing PCs and the Internet eliminated thousands of obsolete jobs.?In the telecom industry, some examples include typing pools, telephone operators, and phone booth installers.

However, new computing and online tools created millions more jobs than the obsolete roles that were destroyed. New technical positions for network engineers, programmers, data, and security specialists have exploded in the forty years since then.

The computing revolution also created thousands of non-technical jobs for every purely technical position. Examples include business analysts, project managers, digital marketers, and sales and operations specialists. These business domain specialists?rely on computer applications to translate technical capabilities into new business strategies and improved operations.

You don’t have to become a data scientist.

There are many reasons to believe these trends will continue in the age of AI. You don’t need to master machine learning or Python to participate in the AI revolution. Just like using desktop and cloud applications today, you can find AI applications to get answers to questions and solve problems more quickly and effectively. You also can?learn to deploy AI to create new business opportunities and improve existing processes.

But you will need to learn how to use AI tools.

There are already dozens of AI platforms and thousands of AI applications. Chatbots are the most accessible type of AI because they use large learning models (LLMs) and natural language processing (NLP) to create an easy-to-use human-machine interface.

As the name suggests, chatbots have conversations with you, remember what you write or say, and suggest new things to consider.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the first commercial chatbot. Learning how to use it is one way to start your AI journey, especially if you are job hunting. This link will take you to?a short tutorial we created about using CoPilot for free access to ChatGPT 4.0?to find a new job.

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