Helping Employee's through the AI Workforce Revolution.

As a former Automation Engineer and having just returned from AI Summit West I have been thinking a lot about the impact of AI on our team members.? One of the large discussions at the end of the summit revolved around the continued revolutionary impact of AI on employees. This topic is a very important item to discuss, as it is a continued evolution of a conversation, started when firms first began embracing automation. These conversations typically revolve around two major questions, “Am I being replaced by a computer?” and “What is an employee’s future role in the workforce?”. I think it’s important to discuss both of these questions, as they are major fears of team members and then how we as leaders can help alleviate those stressors and help our team members embrace AI.?

?Am I being replaced by a computer?

Let’s start by talking about the first question, “Am I being replaced by a computer?”, while the answer is almost always unequivocally no, how do we explain the downsizing of teams, and displacement of workers? Ikea is a great example to look at. At the start of 2021 Ikea announced they would be eliminated call center employees and replace them with an AI Chatbot named Billie. This change was set to replace a slate of 8500 jobs, but as an article on stealthesethoughts points out the plan was not to eliminate 8500 employees but Upskill them. Creating a new role of design advisor allowed those team members to stay with Ikea and fill a role that in turn amounted to 1.3 Billion dollars in revenue.

So how does this translate to other roles and teams? I have often heard this problem referred to by many different names, but I like to use the term the “If only” problem. As anyone who was in an office setting pre-covid and before the mass exodus to remote work, one of the most common things I heard from team members when discussing problems or issues (especially large, or complex issues) was “If only I had time”. Whether this was updating a tech stack, applying updates to servers, or simply refactoring code, there is always more work to be done especially in growing tech companies. My response to those employees who have reservations has always been we are not eliminating what you do, we are giving you more time to add value in more areas. The value of each employee’s unique intersection of skills and abilities as well as the business needs of a company allows us as leaders to give them more opportunities to shine. Whether that is a direct impact on revenue as seen with Ikea or improved customer CSAT scores allowing a refocus of employees on where the most value lies are how we will help ourselves grow into the future.

?Upskilling and the role of employees in the future workforce.

With a focus on upskilling, the conversation around “What is an employee’s future role in the workforce?” becomes much clearer. I believe there will be two major roles for a team member to fill in the future, The Shepard, and The Specialist. Let’s look at each role and what they try to accomplish.

The Shepard is a balance to our friend the AI. While most AI can when well-trained alleviate the day-to-day muddiness of mundane tasks, Shepard's are the check on these tasks. They handle the exceptions, checking results and general feedback of an AI output. This could take the form of verifying automated troubleshooting and root cause analysis or checking the verbiage and information in marketing materials. These are invaluable skills that require knowledge of a process or product to help guide us to our desired results.

The Specialist is an augmentation of our friend the AI. Most teams already have someone in this role, the person that everyone may look to for escalations or complicated questions. The inclusion of AI will allow us to upskill more of our team members to be specialists, growing their skillsets for future career success. As the complexity of Tech grows the need for deep understanding also grows. In almost every field of Tech we continue to see jobs becoming more singularly focused with less emphasis on wearing multiple hats in the traditional sense. While this specialization used to come as companies scale, we are now seeing the ability for smaller firms to employ specialized talent that would have otherwise not been accessible or as useful as they can be now.

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As leaders we should consider it our obligation to understand where our team members want to sit within this new world of AI. We all have team members who love what they do and where they are now, who would slide perfectly into a Shepard type role. While we also have team members who are itching to learn and try new things “if only they had time”. Having these conversations early and often with your team especially as companies support and put more money into LLM’s and traditional ML models to help solve problems of scale, will ensure they understand that adopting an AI tool simply affords them a different set of opportunities rather than replacement.