2/24/2018 Artificial Intelligence: the impact on employment and the workforce

Applause from Athanassios Kollyris, Christina Filippou, and 41 others

George Krasadakis
Product Architect | Tech Inventor | Entrepreneur. Writing on Innovation and Product
Development; Views, ideas and opinions are my own.
Jan 18 · 6 min read

Arti cial Intelligence: the impact on

employment and the workforce
How is AI replacing jobs? Which roles and industries will
be most impacted? How can societies get prepared?

image: pixabay

Although Arti cial Intelligence dramatically improves our world in

many ways, there are notable concerns regarding the forthcoming
impact of A.I. on employment and the workforce. There are
predictions talking about millions of unemployed people in the next
decades — primarily due to the impact of Intelligent Automation and
A.I. systems. In any case, the entire socioeconomic system is entering a
phase of accelerating transformation: markets, businesses, education,
government, social welfare and employment models will be severely
impacted.

Tasks, Roles and Jobs at risk

Tasks which are monotonous, can be easily automated; this can
gradually make certain roles obsolete. For instance, tasks and activities

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2/24/2018 Artificial Intelligence: the impact on employment and the workforce

related to customer care/call center operation, document classi cation,

discovery and retrieval, content moderation are more and more based on
technology and automation and less on human work. The same is true
for roles related to operation and support of production lines and
factories: humans are being replaced by smart robots which can safely
navigate the space, nd and move objects (such as products, parts or
tools) or perform complex assembling operations.

A.I. proves to be very e ective in handling even more complex activities

— those requiring processing of multiple signals, data streams and
accumulated knowledge in real time. A characteristic case is the
autonomous vehicles which can capture and ‘understand’ the
environment and its dynamics; they can ‘see’, decide and act in real-
time, towards well de ned optimization objectives.

Check also: What’s next on AI, AR, VR, NUI, Robotics, Data &
Visualization, Blockchain

Sectors that will be impacted

Transportation is already in a transformation mode — fully
autonomous cars will be soon a reality — and they will be safer, more
e cient and more e ective. Professional drivers (taxi, trucks and
more) will see the demand for their skill set dropping rapidly.

Electronic commerce will also undergo signi cant transformation:

ful llment centres will be fully automated, with robots navigating the
space to collect products and execute customer orders; to be then sent
or even delivered to customers, also automatically, with autonomous
drones and/or cars. The importance of salespersons and networks of
physical stores will shrink; we are close to scenarios where consumer
A.I. agents negotiate with Retailer AI agents — based on di erent
objectives, tactics and strategies.

Even more traditional professions which are built on top of strong

human relationships, such as legal professions, will be signi cantly
impacted: typical support services in a legal context, have to do with
document handling -classi cation, discovery, summarization,
comparison, knowledge extraction and management — tasks where AI
agents can do a great job already.

Financial services, Insurance and any other sector requiring

signi cant amount of data processing and content handling will also
bene t from A.I. And of course states, governance and social mechanisms
— A.I. can have a great role in eliminating bureaucracy, improving

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2/24/2018 Artificial Intelligence: the impact on employment and the workforce

the service to citizens, along with the design and performance of social
programmes.

How Arti cial Intelligence can replace human work —

an example
Imagine a typical customer care department: tens or even hundreds
of specialized employees working with a shared mission: to handle
customer requests, complaints, asks etc. in the best possible way.

The work stream of ‘handling a customer request in the best possible way’
can be broken down in separated jobs which are repeated overtime and
across di erent types of requests, for instance: customer identi cation,
customer history retrieval, request understanding and classi cation,
problem identi cation and mapping to a solution space, forwarding or
escalating to another team, customer document retrieval and nally the
decisioning based on the suitable corporate policy.

All the above can be covered with increased e ectiveness from A.I.
algorithms — they prove to be faster, more accurate, reliable and cheaper
than the corresponding team of humans. A properly trained A.I.
system can understand customer requests in natural language,
identify the mentioned or implied entities (for instance, which product
or service the request refers to); it can estimate customer’s intent early
enough (for example, to activate a service or ask for help); it can
instantly process large volumes of data and apply the corporate policy
in order to identify the best action/ decision for the particular case; the
decision can then be communicated to the customer in natural
language.

The system also knows early enough if it can handle the request with
con dence or not; in the latter case it knows where to redirect the request
as an exception, for a human team to handle it. And all these, in

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2/24/2018 Artificial Intelligence: the impact on employment and the workforce

milliseconds, as part of a chat or voice session between the

customer and companies’ agent.

This technological solution requires just a small percentage of the

human team that a traditional customer care department has. And
while this hybrid system is in operation, the A.I. component learns
from the exceptions it forwards to the human team to handle,
leading to a continuous improvement of its performance. This feedback
loop will eventually minimize the need for human intervention,
making the AI system autonomous.

. . .

Getting ready
In the long run we will witness certain roles and jobs becoming less and
less relevant, and nally obsolete. But, in most of the cases, Arti cial
Intelligence will have a supportive role to humans — empowering the
human factor to perform better in handling complex and critical
situations which require judgement and creative thinking. In parallel
there would be numerous new roles and specialties with focus on
technology and science. For example, there will be needs for highly
skilled professionals to oversee or manage or coordinate the training of
complex Arti cial Intelligence systems; to ensure their integrity, security,
objectivity and proper use.

Under certain assumptions, and following the initial disruption due

to technological unemployment, the AI revolution, will lead to a new
era of prosperity, creativeness and well-being. Humans will no more need
to perform routine, limited value, jobs. The workforce and the
underlying employment models, will move from long-term, full-time
employment agreements, to exible, selective premium services o erings.

There will be a stream of new business opportunities

empowering a culture of entrepreneurship,
creativeness and innovation.

The above positive scenario requires a common, shared understanding of

the technology, its opportunities and its risks. Societies need to adapt to
the new technology landscape, become more exible and also inherit an
attitude of lifelong learning, collaboration, innovation and
entrepreneurship. States need a new strategy with focus on education;
they need to rethink how markets, companies and employment

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agreements should work in the new era of intelligent automation; they

need to redesign the social mechanisms to cover a range of new
scenarios and situations.

At an even higher level, we need a solid framework to avoid the

unbalanced concentration of technology power and control.

A startup ecosystem by unemployed people

Imagine a platform where unemployed people can

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