AI is set to shake up 300 million global jobs. It’s going to disrupt entire industries, wipe out entire professions, leave the masses unemployed and struggling.
Or is it?
If you’ve seen headlines like these, you (and the other 299,999,999 people in the global firing line) could be forgiven for thinking that AI is gunning for your job.
But the reality isn’t that simple — or that bleak.
Transforming old jobs …
Yes, AI will disrupt nearly every industry, and yes, it’s going to have a transformative effect on how many of us do our day-to-day jobs. Repetitive actions will be automated. Complex tasks will be simplified. Decisions will be driven by data.
But what’s buried in the fine print is that, even though 85% of CEOs are planning to increase their AI spend this year, the end goal isn’t necessarily replacing human workers — in a recent survey, 77% of senior leaders said that AI has had ‘no effect or minimal effect on the elimination of jobs.’
Instead, when it’s deployed effectively, AI can lead to new professional opportunities for workers who can harness the power of these technologies. Consider a chatbot that triages customer enquiries or an algorithm that identifies fraud warning signs in banking transactions. By taking over often low-value, high time commitment tasks, AI is freeing people up to do more complex and creative tasks.
… and creating new ones
The other message that often gets lost in the clickbait is that AI is set to create more jobs that it’s going to wipe out. According to the World Economic Forum, many of these new roles will fall into three key categories: trainers (the people developing AI), explainers (the people teaching others how to use it) and sustainers (making sure organisations are leveraging maximum value out of their AI tools).
Even when AI becomes a mainstay of existing roles, ‘companies will still need someone to prompt the AI, make sense of the results and take action’, says CNBC. The key, then, is to build the skills and knowledge to work effectively with and alongside these technologies.
Harnessing the power of AI with UTS Open
These competencies are what’s known as ‘AI literacy’, a skillset that’s already highly in demand across industries of all kinds: 85% of Australian leaders say that new hires will need AI-relevant skills, while a Microsoft survey of 31,000 people in 31 countries found that ‘the ability to work iteratively with AI will be a key skill for every employee’.
The first step in building your AI literacy can be as simple as enrolling in a short course or microcredential with a focus on AI. At UTS Open, a leading provider of short forms of learning, you can study with leading technologists and start building the skills you need to future proof your career. What’s more, UTS Open’s short courses and micros are built on real postgraduate course content and backed by the academic rigour of UTS.
Take a deep dive into machine learning, data science tools and popular algorithms that sit at the foundation of current and emerging AI technologies and build fundamental expertise that will prepare you to leverage the power of AI in your workplace.
