AI having a positive impact on job creation and workplaces, conference told

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is helping to create far more jobs than it is undermining and will change workplaces for the better, according to a leading Irish expert on the area. Professor Barry O’Sullivan of UCC’s School of Computer Science and IT also cautioned however that AI has the potential to contribute to societal division if care is not taken to ensure the financial benefits it brings are shared across all of a company’s staff.

Prof O’Sullivan, who is director of the Science Foundation Ireland Centre for Research Training in AI, told Ibec’s annual Leadership Summit, a conference for HR managers and professionals, that he believes the technology is a force for good.

In an Ibec survey on workplace trends published to coincide with the event, 30 per cent of the almost 400 firms across a range of sectors that responded said AI is already helping to increase their productivity, with 59 per cent suggesting they believe it has the potential to do so in the future.

Ibec’s executive director for employer relations Maeve McElwee said the issue is “huge” for the organisation’s membership at present.

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Prof O’Sullivan said it remains to be seen how the financial dividend of the increased productivity that can flow from AI is shared out.

“For years we’ve been hearing AI is going to replace jobs, with mass unemployment as a consequence of it but that really just hasn’t materialised,” he said after addressing the event.

“It will certainly change jobs but I don’t believe there are going to be winners and losers in the way people often talk about it.

“There may be, though, in the sense that automation has always improved productivity and the benefits of those increases are not always shared equitably across society.

“If you look at what happened in manufacturing in the US in the 1970s, there was massive automation, but the wages of manufacturing workers didn’t improve at all really in line with the productivity gains. I think you can draw a line from that directly to the current political crisis in the United States because you can create a disaffected population who felt they’ve lost out.

“So I don’t think there’s going to be any mass or employment issue. But there is going to be a losers and winners situation if we’re not careful in terms of sharing of the benefits; that’s something that I think we should really be focused on.”

Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, professor of business psychology at University College London and Columbia University, told the conference that pessimistic predictions regarding the impact of AI on the workforce had to date been well wide of the mark, with the technology currently contributing to labour shortages by creating new roles across a wide range of sectors.

He cautioned however that there was a long-established tendency to “overestimate the short-term impact of technology but underestimate its longer-term impact”.

For now, he suggested, AI is having a positive impact on employment opportunities but has made upskilling and reskilling more important than ever for employers.

Dr Chamorro-Premuzic, who is also the chief talent scientist at Manpower Group, said there would continue to be huge opportunities presented by the technology but people would certainly need to adapt to it by “harnessing the skills that AI is never likely to master,” such as those more rooted in empathy, self-awareness and creativity.

He argued that far from trying to prevent students from using AI in their studies, universities should be training them to use it in a critical fashion as this will be an important role in the workplace.

“Now, instead of asking my students to write an essay about Freud, I ask them to write an essay about what AI gets wrong about Freud. That makes them delve deeper.”

In the workplace, he said, “it’s increasingly about asking the right questions”.

“AI is the intellectual equivalent of the fast food industry,” he added, however. “It gives us quick, tasty, free, or cheap, access to synthetic knowledge and maybe just like the fast food industry gave rise to the slow food movement, we need to think about the intellectual equivalent of that.

Meanwhile, staff expectations in relation to remote and hybrid working has remained the most pressing topic for company management in 2023 according to the newly published Ibec Workplace Trends and Insights report.

The survey of almost 400 firms, a mix from domestically owned and multinationals, spread across a wide range of sectors, finds that companies are still feeling the impact of changed employee attitudes to work during the pandemic and, in many cases, still not settled on a long term strategy to address or accommodate them.

Just over a quarter of respondents said employee expectations with regard to the issue was the single factor having the greatest impact on the running of their business while almost two-thirds rated it in their top five.

This issue crops up repeatedly in the survey with roughly half of the firms saying they find it harder to recruit for onsite- only roles and 69 per cent saying it is influencing their business operating model due to the need to manage talent.