Managing the Social Impact of Artificial Intelligence
AI has the potential to bring about unprecedented people-related changes. Leaders must recognise the profound impact that AI can have on the workforce and organisations and the need to adopt a new approach to support organisations to not only survive but thrive.
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, artificial intelligence (AI) is at the forefront of technological innovation. In a recent report published by Expleo, 80% of key decision makers surveyed said that AI is currently, or already has transformed their industry. With AI expected to contribute a staggering US$15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, it’s no wonder that 96% of businesses have already or plan to deploy AI tools in the coming months.
This surge in AI investment, which has more than doubled since 2017 is driven by the technology’s potential to bring business benefits such as:
Transform productivity through automating processes
Enable data-driven decision making
Drive innovation through creating new products and services.
The opportunity that AI presents for both our business and our clients is exciting and we feel strongly about the importance of people in enabling and championing its transformative potential.
The impact on people and organisations
AI adoption is not without its challenges and unlike previous technological advancements, AI has the potential to bring about fundamental cultural, workforce and organisational changes that will make the people-related obstacles more pronounced than ever before. Internal resistance from employees is widely recognised as a significant barrier to successful AI adoption, with nearly one third of people citing it as a major challenge. This resistance often stems from concerns around job displacement and insecurity, the need for clarity on how AI will impact careers and on how to access training to acquire skills and capabilities to work alongside and embrace new technologies. It is clear that AI deployments are not only technical processes, but that they will likely either succeed or fail based on acceptance from people, and that acceptance is a key contributor to successful adoption. There is a lot to explore here and we will look at this in future articles.
While 94% of C-suite executives plan to increase technology investments this year, only 26% of that investment will be directed towards workforce reskilling. Contrary to this, we at Antony Harvey Executive believe that people are fundamental to the success of any AI strategy investment and recognise the importance of organisations managing the impact on their people as they innovate and scale their use of AI.
We are currently seeing the effect of technology replacing blue collar jobs playing out across the world. The impact of AI promises to be bigger than any other technical revolution in history; politicians, policy makers, academics, senior executives and non-executive board members must act now to manage AI’s impact on blue collar workers and society as a whole before it’s too late.