The year 2020 will be a pivotal year in AI-related
employment dynamics, according to Gartner, Inc., as artificial intelligence (AI) will become a positive job motivator. The number of jobs
affected by AI will vary by industry; through 2019, healthcare, the public
sector and education will see continuously growing job demand while
manufacturing will be hit the hardest. Starting in 2020, AI-related job
creation will cross into positive territory, reaching two million net-new jobs
in 2025.
"Many significant
innovations in the past have been associated with a transition period of
temporary job loss, followed by recovery, then business transformation and AI
will likely follow this route," said Svetlana Sicular, research vice president
at Gartner. AI will improve the productivity of many jobs, eliminating millions
of middle- and low-level positions, but also creating millions more new
positions of highly skilled, management and even the entry-level and
low-skilled variety.
"Unfortunately,
most calamitous warnings of job losses confuse AI with automation — that
overshadows the greatest AI benefit — AI augmentation — a combination of human and artificial intelligence, where both
complement each other."
IT leaders should not
only focus on the projected net increase of jobs. With each investment in AI-enabled
technologies, they must take into consideration what jobs
will be lost, what jobs will be created, and how it will transform how workers
collaborate with others, make decisions and get work done.
"Now is the time
to really impact your long-term AI direction," said Sicular. "For the
greatest value, focus on augmenting people with AI. Enrich people's jobs, reimagine old tasks and create new
industries. Transform your culture to make it rapidly adaptable to AI-related
opportunities or threats."
Gartner identified
additional predictions related to AI’s impact on the workplace:
By 2022, one in five
workers engaged in mostly nonroutine tasks will rely on AI to do a job.
AI has already been applied to highly repeatable tasks where large
quantities of observations and decisions can be analyzed for patterns. However,
applying AI to less-routine work that is more varied due to lower repeatability
will soon start yielding superior benefits. AI applied to nonroutine work is
more likely to assist humans than replace them as combinations of humans and
machines will perform more effectively than either human experts or AI-driven
machines working alone will.
"Using AI to
auto-generate a weekly status report or pick the top five emails in your inbox
doesn't have the same wow factor as, say, curing a disease would, which is why
these near-term, practical uses go unnoticed," said Craig Roth, research vice
president at Gartner. "Companies are just beginning to seize the opportunity
to improve nonroutine work through AI by applying it to general-purpose tools.
Once knowledge workers incorporate AI into their work processes as a virtual
secretary or intern, robo-employees will become a competitive necessity."
Through 2022, multichannel
retailer efforts to replace sales associates through AI will prove
unsuccessful, although cashier and operational jobs will be disrupted.
Leveraging technologies such as AI
and robotics, retailers will use
intelligent process automation to identify, optimize and automate
labor-intensive and repetitive activities that are currently performed by
humans, reducing labor costs through efficiency from headquarters to
distribution centers and stores. Many retailers are already expanding
technology use to improve the in-store check-out process.
However, research suggests that many consumers still prefer to
interact with a knowledgeable sales associate when visiting a store,
particularly in specialized areas such as home improvement, drugstores and
cosmetics, where informed associates can make a significant impact on customer
satisfaction. Though they will reduce labor used for check-out and other operational
activities, retailers will find it difficult to eliminate traditional sales
advisers.
"Retailers will
be able to make labor savings by eliminating highly repetitive and
transactional jobs, but will need to reinvest some of those savings into
training associates who can enhance the customer experience," said Robert Hetu, research director at
Gartner "As such most retailers will come to view AI as a way to augment
customer experiences rather than just removing humans from every process."
In 2021, AI augmentation
will generate $2.9 trillion in business value and recover 6.2 billion hours of
worker productivity.
While many industries
will receive growing business value from AI, manufacturing is one that will
receive a massive share of the business value opportunity. Automation will lead
to cost savings, while the removal of friction in value chains will increase
revenue further, for example, in the optimization of supply chains and
go-to-market activities.
However, some
industries, such as outsourcing, are seeing a fundamental change in their
business models, whereby the cost reduction from AI and the resulting
productivity improvement must be reinvested to allow reinvention and the
perusal of new business model opportunities.
"AI can take on
repetitive and mundane tasks, freeing up humans for other activities, but the
symbiosis of humans with AI will be more nuanced and will require reinvestment
and reinvention instead of simply automating existing practices,"
said Mike Rollings, research vice president at Gartner. "Rather than have a
machine replicating the steps that a human performs to reach a particular
judgment, the entire decision process can be refactored to use the relative
strengths and weaknesses of both machine and human to maximize value generation
and redistribute decision making to increase agility."
