The Future of Work: How AI is Changing the Job Landscape

With more and more companies integrating artificial intelligence into the workplace, what does this mean for employees' futures and careers?



The Future of Work: How AI is Changing the Job Landscape
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If you just think about the last 5 years alone, how your conversations have changed between your family and friends. Some of you may not speak about technology at all, but we can admit that it's hard not to consider it is around us.

The recent release of ChatGPT and now GoogleBard are taking the world by storm with their amazing capabilities. You start to look at these tools and figure out how they can improve your work life, the company's process, your personal life, and more. 

Artificial Intelligence is automating tasks that were once only capable of being done by humans. The relevance of automating certain tasks to make human life easier will only continue to grow. Some may call us lazy, some people just think it's the smarter option. 

Here are a few examples of how AI is changing the job landscape:

  • Automation: Automating tasks. This is leading to a heavy loss of jobs but is also creating new opportunities for others.
  • New job opportunities: AI systems will require human workers to work alongside them, such as data scientists, and machine learning engineers.
  • A shift in skill requirements: The more AI applications are integrated, the current and new workers will need to understand more about how the system works, the engineer, the analysis phases, etc. 
  • Work-life balance: The rise of AI tools is allowing more people to work remotely, part-time and/or freelance as the tasks are automated. 

 

How is AI Automation Changing the Job Landscape?

 

Automation is currently the biggest reason why there is a shift in the job landscape. As more and more tasks are getting done by artificial intelligence and fewer are getting done by actual humans, you can understand why companies will start to lay off employees. The cost with employees comes with a salary, pension, health insurance, maternity/paternity leave and more. More companies are seeing employees as a loss, and automating artificial intelligence tools is their biggest breakthrough. 

Below are a few sectors that have already implemented automated tasks: 

 

Customer Service

 

Just a few weeks ago, the world was hit with ChatGPT and Google Bard. More and more industries are adopting AI-powered chatbots to provide customer service. With the rise of large language models, we can only expect these chatbots to get better at handling customers' queries, answering their questions, resolving problems, and even making sales.

For example, chatbots are also used in the financial industry for tasks such as signing up new applicants for insurance, Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti Money Laundering (AML) policies and processes. The implementation of automated tooling for tasks as sensitive as these proves to use the success of AI and how it will only continue. 

 

Data Entry

 

Data Entry tasks used to be manual tasks, that would be very tedious and repetitive. There were some flaws in this sector due to the tasks being very repetitive and boring and the workers were more susceptible to making errors. 

AI is now able to automate data entry tasks, by extracting the data from raw files or documentation and entering it into a database. 

 

Driving

 

Well, we all know about self-driving cars. More and more of them are coming to the market with companies such as Tesla, Waymo and Uber. These cars use AI computer vision to safely drive passengers from A to B, navigate roads and avoid obstacles.

 

Finance

 

As I already mentioned before, chatbots are being used in the financial industry to automate some processes and tasks such as KYC. AI is also being used to help these financial firms to analyze data, to make better current and future predictions. 

The financial industry has a lot of data at its disposal. The more historical data, the better their analytical outputs will be. This unfortunately will cause a shift in the need for people to work along the AI systems, rather than the AI systems working for people.

 

Healthcare

 

For an industry where a lot of people are shocked to see the integration of AI tooling, we can only expect to see more. Healthcare industry professionals are using AI to diagnose diseases, recommend treatments through data analysis, and even perform surgery with robotics. 

 

How AI is Creating New Jobs

 

As AI continues to grow, the choices for the majority of people will be to get laid off or work alongside the AI systems. This is why you naturally see a rise in data professionals, more courses on learning how to code, BootCamps and more. 

You are going to naturally see more of these roles:

 

Data Science

 

Data Science is a combination of statistics, data analysis, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Therefore, Data Scientists will be responsible for collating, preparing, cleaning, and manipulating data to identify patterns in the data and perform advanced data analysis. 

 

Machine Learning Engineers

 

A Machine Learning (ML) Engineer is a programmer who is proficient in researching, building, and designing software to automate predictive models. Their role is to build Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems that consume large amounts of data to generate and develop algorithms that are capable of learning and making future predictions. 

 

AI Trainers

 

AI tools are best when they’ve learned all the knowledge they need. AI trainers will be required to help teach AI systems how to perform tasks. They will also be responsible for collecting data, labelling it, and then inputting it into the AI algorithms to learn from the labelled data and ensure it produces accurate outputs.

 

So What Should We Expect?

 

It is difficult to see what the future holds, especially when artificial intelligence is in the mix. Unfortunately, we will start to see more people losing their jobs to AI, and others will be created to work alongside AI systems.

This will create a shift in people's desire to learn new skills to ensure job security. We will start to see more people learning programming languages, understanding AI and how to make use of it in sales, marketing, etc. 

Along with the pandemic causing a big shift in how people work, AI has also added to it. There will be a continuation of more people working from home, and travelling the world whilst working as AI systems can automate a lot of their tasks. 

With this information, I think it is important for anyone, regardless of their current job title, to be aware of how AI will cause a shift in the job landscape and how to prepare with meeting currently demanded skills.
 
 
Nisha Arya is a Data Scientist, Freelance Technical Writer and Community Manager at KDnuggets. She is particularly interested in providing Data Science career advice or tutorials and theory based knowledge around Data Science. She also wishes to explore the different ways Artificial Intelligence is/can benefit the longevity of human life. A keen learner, seeking to broaden her tech knowledge and writing skills, whilst helping guide others.