Few things make employees dread as much as change in work environment. And the rapid developments in the field of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are bringing in cutting edge changes to businesses. Artificial Intelligence can handle massive amounts of data and automate mundane tasks being able to carry them out in a matter of minutes that earlier would take days to do. To business owners, this is a great investment. There are a lot of questions and apprehensions when a company decides to take the AI plunge, with the most obvious one being if the current workforce gets replaced by robots. The questions would be – am I losing my job to a robot? Do I have any future in this company? The ideal answer to both questions can be and should be a yes! As per Forbes, Technology will not only make jobs easier for us, but it will take away a lot of mundane tasks that we need to perform giving us more time for more enjoyable work.
The successful Transition to Artificial Intelligence can be essentially understood with the 3 Es – Educate, Enable and Empower.
Educate: Employees who understand that they need to upskill get excited about being educated. New technology means a new learning curve. This is why a meeting with your team is necessary to get everyone on the education campaign. In order to accomplish a vibe of wanting to be educated, the business heads must show employees how AI can benefit the company in the long run and even in their individual careers. Re-training of the workforce of today in order to work with AI has a benefit that is double-edges. Employees can gain skills that affect their career graph in a drastically positive way. Knowing that they will gain skills for their future, they will tend to be enthusiastic about giving their best to the company, thereby making them even more valuable.
Enable: Problem finding is an innate human characteristic. This means that newly trained employees also are trained to point out the problems to AI, thus becoming managers. AI managerial roles will be new to the businesses. You employees who learn AI and would like to have more independence in their jobs will find AI adoption a great opportunity. As AI managers train for their new job roles, their managers send them around for different job roles to see how they can align their new skills. At IIHT, parts of the training is also very job role specific.
Empower: Once the AI products are purchased and the new employees are training, it is required to get employees to think critically and find problems that their AI products can fix. Micromanagers will not be required in an AI driven work space. All that managers need to do is provide a roadmap to all AI roles. They would then need to take a step back and empower their employees to take control. The nervous employee who was insecure about losing his job to a robot now becomes a valuable asset at this stage. They no more need to be engaged in monotonous or sometimes even creative work. There is no sure way of predicting what the future can hold. But not very long ago, Artificial Intelligence sounded like a takeover of a lot of human jobs. But it need not be a human vs. machine situation, but can in fact be, a human AND machine situation. Companies who are taking steps in investing in machine and human capital are the ones that reap the greatest benefits.
