In a panel discussion Tuesday at the 2017 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, tech leaders shared their views of the role of artificial intelligence in business. Vista Equity Partners founder Robert F. Smith ran the panel, which featured Ginni Rometty (CEO of IBM), Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft Corp.), Joichi Ito (director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab) and Ron Gutman (CEO of HealthTap Inc.).
Rometty and Nadella stressed that AI will augment human employees rather than replacing them: “It’s our responsibility to have AI augment human ingenuity and opportunity,” Nadella said. Rometty shared IBM’s three guiding principles for developing AI; the third was to go beyond training the system itself and ensure that employees are trained in the skills they need to work with AI.
“The skills needed to succeed in this world are not all high-degree skills,” she said. “Give them a curriculum that’s relevant, give them mentorship, and be sure they’re teaching what you’re hiring them for.”
Training Employees to Work With AI
According to Kiplinger, AI specialists are one of the fastest-growing jobs in technology. As AI permeates every industry, companies either need new hires to work on the AI or training to develop current employees’ skills. It’s important that these employees develop not only technical skills but also problem-solving skills, the ability to think analytically and creativity, according to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Training is still needed for people who don’t work on developing AI but who work with AI, as well. For example, IBM’s AI system, Watson, can use machine learning to help oncologists analyze patient data. However, those oncologists must be able to provide Watson with the right data and apply Watson’s conclusions to patient care. At companies that use AI for administrative tasks like scheduling meetings, employees need training to be able to use those systems. Many companies that use AI even contract with human employees to support the technology behind the scenes, responding to, for example, reports of “questionable content” on social media sites. Microsoft researchers wrote in Harvard Business Journal earlier this month that “this workforce deserves training, support and compensation.” Humana Inc. even uses “digital coaches” to help its call center employees learn how to respond well to customers.
Business schools are realizing how important this training is; Harvard and MIT are two of the universities whose business schools recently added MBA courses on managing AI. Topics include managing algorithm design, data analytics, using personality profiles generated by AI to create leadership teams and developing algorithms for marketing.
In 1999, the U.S. Department of Labor predicted that 65 percent of schoolchildren would have careers that had not been invented yet. But the future is upon us; AI is impacting the workplace now. Employees need training to equip them to work both on and with the new artificial intelligences that are so dramatically changing the modern organization.
