AI integrates workforce with technology — albeit a reskilled and transformed one

Artificial Intelligence has changed work life across organisations as we know it. As enterprises began their digital transformation journey and adapt to intelligent technologies this leaves a lacuna amongst the existing working force adept into working with legacy systems to suddenly find themselves trying to swim in uncharted waters.

Change management is a tuff paradigm to adopt, and large companies may find themselves not on the same page as their employees. Multiple research estimates estimate that only about one-quarter of an enterprise workforce are prepared for this transitional change.

However, large scale AI adoption is still underway and it may take another decade for revolutionary technologies like AI, ML, Intelligent Automation to become a norm with few organisations moving ahead to bridge the skill gap.

Addressing the AI skill Gap

An interaction between "human + machine" calls for a new approach in business. The advent of an array of new technologies appearing in the workplace leaves employees with an urgent need to learn how to use AI to augment their skills.

Both enterprises and workforce must work in tandem to exhibit that they are mutually ready to adapt to intelligent technologies. This calls for an identification of new tasks and skills which will be the pre-curser to digital disruption. Besides, an investment in digital education within companies to embrace smart technologies is also needed to speed up learning and tap latent intelligence. The need to develop motivation is absolutely critical both among the workforce and the management to learn disruptive technologies.

In a global skills gap survey conducted by Analytics Insight, Artificial Intelligence technologies have the highest skill gap in 2020, pegged at 66%, followed by Cybersecurity at 64%. This difference in skill gap is seen across industries, which is as high as 60% on an average.

Global Skill Gap 2020 – Analytics Insight Estimates

Strategy to create a future workforce

Business leaders must consider to redesign work schedules, organise workforce and address re-skilling which promotes cohesiveness among humans and intelligent machines to improve innovation, growth and productivity.

Redesign Work Schedule

• Balancing automation and human augmentation by allocating work to machines and people proportionately.

• Create new job roles and free people from manual and rule-based functional roles to build agile and project-based teams.

• Create internal capabilities required for new roles and match this to existing skills or source new talent.

Organise Workforce

• Reorganise workforce suited to the changing business models. Restructure teams that support new customer experiences.

• Rationalise business case models and deploy automation technologies to fuel growth.

• Create flexible processes that support both core business and the emerging workflows.

• Cultivate new leadership hindsight at all levels to pivot the business into new growth models.

Address Re-Skilling

• Prioritize workforce which needs re-skilling. Strike a balance between social and technical skills.

• Identify which technologies are imperative to the organisation, choose between AI, ML, NLP, RPA, Deep learning critical to the organisation.

• Accelerate the use of VR, AR and Al to scale up training and development to address the AI skill gap.