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Gartner says AI is a ‘net creator’ of jobs
By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>
GOLDMAN SACHS predicts that 300 million jobs will be lost or degraded by artificial intelligence (AI).
But Gartner, the company that builds strategies in the IT sector, says AI – and its most popular emination so far, ChatGPT – are net creators of jobs.
Gartner Australia’s vice president of human resources (HR) advisory, Aaron McEwan said it was hard to envisage jobs that would not be impacted by automation – but what automation tends to do is push jobs up the value and complexity bar. 
“There probably will be a handful of jobs that might be eliminated altogether, but the more likely scenario is that these types of technologies impact all jobs and change them,” Mr McEwan told Talking Business.
“A more likely scenario is that parts of people’s jobs will be carved away and automated and generally that tends to be less complex repeatable work,” Mr McEwan said.
Creative, artistic pursuits impacted?
Mr McEwan said with the speed of the adoption of generative AI, areas that were thought to be immune to automation, like the more creative and artistic pursuits, were likely to impacted.
But even then, he said, there were limits to what impact AI could have on artists as it would push that work up the complexity bar.
“So while artists might be in a bit of strife because it’s now cheap and easy to create artworks, I’m not sure the average punter is going to be wanting to hang an AI-generated piece of art on their wall because there will be millions and millions of them, so we’ll be looking for more increasingly interesting work,” Mr McEwan said.
What kind of insurance against AI?
A good example on how AI would change work could in the insurance sector.
Five years ago, the calls coming in to a customer service rep working in a call centre would have been about a change of address or change of policy. All that work now can, and will be, handled by automated processes of chatbots and algorithms.
But we are living in a time when the claims are rising because of the impact of climate change. So people will call in to that rep now when they have lost a house due to a flood or bushfire – and the complexity of those claims will have increased.
“So even though you might not be fielding a bunch of calls about updating policies, the most likely calls they will be taking will be ‘I’ve just lost my house to a natural disaster and I may have even lost members of my family or beloved pets’,” he said.
“So the requirement on the human being that fields that call is a higher order of cognitive complexity but, more importantly, a higher order of emotional complexity.
“So the work just gets harder and more complex, it doesn’t necessarily go away.”
No emotion in AI
So ChatGPT is very good at wordsmithing, but at this stage it does not understand the emotional complexity that goes into communications. Which is why some human vetting is essential with AI.
Mr McEwan said AI would dramatically reduce the cost of software development. It will potentially democratise it and place it in the hands of employees who will become “citizen developers”.
“One of the exciting elements of the future is the degree and speed at which citizen developers will tackle the most annoyingly minute components of people’s work and hopefully eradicate and improve those,” Mr McEwan said.
“Rather than needing to understand coding, what you need to understand is how to work with a generative AI application, put the right inputs in so that you get the right responses from it.”
Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness
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