Transition to the age of talent – Part 4: AI comes to town

We’re entering a decade of transition that will change our entire economy and the social contracts we have. We’re currently in a perfect storm of different developments that power this transition. In a short series I’ll describe every one of these elements of this perfect storm and why this means the very fabric of our societies will change. And why I think we’re moving to the age of talent.

Technology always plays a major part in any transition. The steam engine for the industrial revolution, the transistor for the information age and now AI will once again change our society. As the steam engine moved the majority of workers from agriculture to the factory and the transistor moved the majority of workers from the factory to the office, the question is: where will AI move the majority of the people now?

The great thing is that part of this answer is: retirement. As we’ve seen in the demographics, many people are retiring anyway, so we need to have technology that’s able to replace them. And AI will. And although for the time being it probably won’t replace an entire job, it will replace many parts of a job making people using it many times more effective. It will also make people, finally, much more productive not just taking away meaningless tasks, but also making less mistakes.

Although hallucinations by ChatGPT and other LLM’s are a major source of concerns, specific models seem to have much less of these mistakes and LLM’s used as foundational models that are then trained on specific data are already assisting for example contact centre agents in providing better answers. I remember an old research where it was shown that the bottom 5% of call centre agents at an American helpdesk had a productivity of -5%. They created more and bigger problems by providing the wrong answers, by accident of course, than they solved during the day.

Also many researches have shown that with programmers bigger teams usually end up being less productive on the whole as the best developers are working less time developing and actually more time coaching and fixing what less good engineers have build. We also know that Git Hub’s co pilot makes the lesser qualified engineers much better. Junior engineers function at a medior level and medior engineers function at a lower senior level because of the AI assistance. So it doesn’t just make them better, it also makes the top engineers perform at their top as they don’t have to watch the rest of the team so much.

AI will also make many tasks much easier to be done by professionals from another field, the clients, than the actual professional as it changes the interface to a chat. So in stead of hiring a designer, one can now just give an AI design tool instructions and a design is made. In stead of giving a brief to a copywriter, the AI tool is the copywriter. The first impacted are usually the freelancers and we’ve seen this happen in the first 6 months after the launch of ChatGPT. Freelance (copy) writing jobs have dropped by 3% and income from these jobs drop by 10%.

AI will create an entirely new set of skills that are valuable. As I wrote in Talent Acquisition Excellence with Kevin Wheeler three main skills that we’re undervalued up until now will become very valuable in an AI future.

1. The editor: the person that checks the AI outputs and makes it better. Whether it’s text, image, video or code, the value of skills are changing. We used to value the initial creator more than the one improving it, but that’s about to change./
2. The fundamental researcher: the person that digs deep into the source of the data that the AI is trained on. Often these people are now seen as annoying and time wasters, wanting to know every detail. Sometimes these people had to leave as whisteblowers because of what they found. But those skills are needed in order to check the AI.
3. The true creative: those people that we think are madmen. Picasso and Guadi in their time. The people truly creating something new, something that’s not been seen before. And that’s not saying every madman is a true creative, but very few have original thoughts and those that do, will thrive in the age of AI. As we do need truly new things, not just improvements on what went before, to move forward.

Bas is a professional snoop. He's a futurist with a focus on the world of work, recruitment and HR technology.

He's a much requested speaker on events all over the world.

His recent book it called Talent Acquisition Excellence.

He organises Digitaal-Werven