Automation and artificial intelligence are two of the hottest topics in business. They have divided the world into two halves. One group thinks AI will take your jobs and put you out of work, while the other faction thinks AI will create more jobs than it takes. Both are true to some extent.
According to a study by Forrester, 10% of jobs in the U.S. have already been automated. This trend will continue and we could see half of all jobs automated by 2030, according to McKinsey's predictions. If you're a worker, this could give you a few sleepless nights.
Fortunately, all hope is not lost. There are many skills you can learn to not only survive but thrive in the age of automation. If you want to stay relevant, you need to keep an eye on emerging trends in recruiting and stay on top of automation and AI news.
1. Communication
With human attention spans at an all-time low, combined with the bombardment of advertisements and information we're exposed to, capturing attention and persuading them to act has become extremely difficult. This is where communication skills can come in handy. The ability to tell a compelling story that your audience can relate to and that motivates them to take the desired action is critical to success. While efforts are underway to create robots that can communicate like humans, there is still a long way to go before this concept becomes a reality.
2. Making Connections
As our world becomes more connected, isolation will be a thing of the past. Companies will need to focus on creating new connections. Regardless of how strong or weak their connections are, having more connections helps you gain access to different organizations and industries.
Studies have shown that the number of weak ties is one of the key differentiators between executives and CEOs. They know that the more connections they have, the more people they can connect with. In most cases, the people you connect with may have more connections than you do, and this gives you the opportunity to connect with people you didn't know. While you can still make connections using social media, at the end of the day, humans are in control.
3. Content
If you've been following news related to automation and AI lately, you may have seen information telling you that you're reading articles written by robots. You can easily find a difference between content and news written by robots and humans. Robots can't express emotions in their writing, because they are emotionless, but a human can. This is why humans are able to establish an emotional connection with their readers through their content.
Bots will struggle with even some of the biggest challenges, while humans can do it without much effort. Humans can build authority by sharing their knowledge and expertise and get better content exposure and search engine rankings than bot-created content.
4. Emotional intelligence
Despite all the advances in the field of AI, machines still have a hard time understanding emotions. Without creating an emotional connection with your target audience, you will never be able to force them to take the action you want them to. Similarly, if you use an AI-based system to make employee-related decisions, such as promoting or firing employees, you'll end up overlooking the emotional factors involved in the decision making.
5. Education
No one can deny the contributions that machines have already made to improving the quality of education and making it accessible to all, but AI struggles when it needs to understand the context of personal development. As a result, it may not be suitable for teaching positions, as teachers need to have a clear understanding of the context within the organization.
Ben Horowitz, who was director of product management at Netscape, realized that most managers were complaining about the workload. To solve this problem, he wrote a little manual called "Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager." After teaching, training and clarifying expectations, the same team began to perform extremely well and quickly became the highest performing team in the organization. That's the difference a little training and teaching can make. An AI would never make the decision to write a document and train employees if they were in a similar situation.
6. Context
Another area in which machines lag behind humans is understanding context. Not only that, they also don't do well when it comes to understanding the business model, analyzing the competition and customers and its leaders. Humans, on the other hand, can do a much better job in this area. For example, a human will send a different pitch to an investor than a robot, because they understand not only the dynamics of the business, but also the context. This means that the chances of the human pitch being accepted are much higher than that of a robot.
7. Ethics
As machines become more intelligent, companies are also concerned about the ethical consequences they may have. Systems that rely on algorithms to make moral judgments find themselves at a loss, as these algorithms are not designed to help them in this area.
Imagine a robot driving a car and finding itself in a situation where it has to choose between hitting the bus in front of it or avoiding it by driving onto the sidewalk where schoolchildren are standing. The only way to train the machines to deal with such situations is to use humans along with the machines. In this way, they will gradually learn what course of action they should take in such a situation.