Will AI Really Replace Your Job? Leaders don’t seem to think so.
“I talk to a lot of executives and I realized very quickly that they are not thinking about AI replacing us—I can say that with complete confidence,” said Ronnie Sheth, CEO of SENEN GROUP, based in Austin, Texas. a strategic advisory firm whose bread and butter is helping companies unlock and integrate artificial intelligence into their work processes. Sheth spoke with Luck about the dangers and potential of AI during an interview at London Tech Week earlier this month.
Fear and speculation that AI will snatch up jobs has permeated every industry. Amazon recently laid off more than a hundred customer service employees. Fortune Jason Del Rey said this is part of an ongoing effort to cut costs and invest in automation. New reports from The newspaper “New York Times and Citigroup are warning bankers and entry-level financiers about the risk of replacement, and just last month Sinovation Ventures CEO Kai-Fu Lee said he believes AI will replace 50% of human jobs in the next decade.
But individual executives may continue to exercise caution, Sheth said. She checked the name of a large construction company that is a client of SENEN. “I just spoke with their CEO, who—obviously as a construction executive—is thinking about robots and artificial intelligence algorithms that could be used to do some of the menial tasks on site.” The boss was not sold, she said. “Many workers asked him if AI would affect their jobs. He told them, “No, but it will improve your safety.” Here’s how CEOs think about it differently. And that’s the right way to think about it.”
This may be little consolation to executives who are nervous about their usefulness and whether they might one day be replaced. Sheth isn’t worried about that either, at least not about effective leaders.
“As CEO, my job is to do several things,” Sheth said. “Manage the culture. Take the company in a direction where it won’t go bankrupt. To ensure sustainable growth. To really improve the community that I’m in.”
Sheth said many executives are more concerned with the human aspects of business, such as branding and communicating with customers, than with cold numbers.
Its clients, which include Fortune 500 companies such as Nike and IBM, startups and non-governmental organizations, are willing to give up their short-term revenue and growth goals to invest in sustainable and viable brand expansion.
“I’m not going to name names, but there are some very, very large retail brands that we’ve worked with that have had some interesting times because they decided to just use AI in a big way and forget about their brand,” Sheth. said. “Not the smartest idea. They have to retreat to branding.”
Replacement theory
In the short term, no jobs will be “truly successfully replaced,” Sheth predicts. “But if you think about it, in 10, 15, 20 years, maybe work on an assembly line? Maybe a little accounting, maybe a little basic marketing, administrative data entry work.”
Of course, she said, they can be replaced or outsourced, but that doesn’t mean the people doing the work will be left with no other options. “I think there is a balance between changing the size of the workforce and developing policies to ensure that AI is used to benefit humanity and not take away people’s livelihoods.”
Business leaders and even public sector government officials have a responsibility to think about how to mitigate the impact of AI on working professionals, Sheth said. Taking it a step further: “I don’t believe a company that says it wants to be AI or data-centric is on the right track,” Sheth said. “You are not values-driven or values-oriented. You are what you focus on.”
Danger of data for people
Drawing on years of projects that Sheth’s company has done with large firms, she said she has noticed that “companies that come to me and say, we want to do more with data. We want to be data-driven, we want to be data-driven—those are the companies that are going to fail.”
This failure stems from one-track thinking—focusing on numbers rather than people. “On the other hand, companies that are saying, ‘We have all this data, how do we now unlock value for the business, for our customers, for our employees, for our community?’ It’s a different attitude.”
The difference between the two, she says, is finding the answer to how to become data-driven rather than unlocking value for individuals. “As business leaders, we really need to focus on making sure that policy and regulation are very, very, very human-centric, and we need to ensure that AI doesn’t inhibit human innovation,” Sheth said. “Right now we’re seeing a lot of fear-based regulation and fear-based policies. I really want innovation to be introduced without compromising human values.”