In an AI-powered world, one thing is certain: change will be constant, and it will be rapid.
Leaders who fully embrace this and figure out a way to prepare their teams to quickly adopt, learn and evolve will be best positioned to navigate the revolution underway.
AI is evolving at a blistering pace and is already helping to boost productivity and new ways of working in every industry from finance to healthcare.
It’s even creating whole new business models.
As workplaces adapt to the ongoing transformation, innovative leaders are being proactive in figuring out how best to leverage it.
Bain & Company Expert Partner Tristan Smith specialises in organisational transformation and change.
“The degree of workforce disruption caused by GenAI is going to be more gradual versus abrupt,” she says.
“In the next one to two years, GenAI is expected to reshape employee tasks and skills; changes to workforce size and structure will take longer to materialise giving time for adaptation.
“It doesn’t happen overnight.
“The reality is how do we prepare the workforce to continue to transition, to reskill and upskill and take advantage of these new tools?
“A lot of companies are doing widespread AI education and upskilling sessions across their organisations – starting with the senior leaders and making sure they fully understand the opportunities and the threats that it brings, and how they might be able to use it to improve the business. Making sure they’re all speaking consistently around AI as a business team, not just the tech team.
“And then similarly, through the organisation: How can people be using it to improve their day jobs or customer experience? What are some of the tools that they could be using?
“So it’s taking the opportunities to upskill the team and bringing them on the journey with you.”
While widescale disruption of industries won’t happen overnight, the pace at which AI is being developed and adopted does present some challenges.
CSIRO principal research scientist Dr Claire Mason leads her organisation’s workforce and productivity team.
“One of the challenges is just staying up to date with the rate of the development of these technologies,” she says.
“It’s really hard to get a clear view on what they’re capable of and to know that that’s going to remain true for the next six months.”
Dr Mason says AI skills were once only considered in the domain of tech jobs but more and more they’re being required in many other roles.
“We’re seeing demand for AI skills in occupations like teaching and architecture and security guards even,” she says.
“The developments that we’re seeing in fields of AI such as dynamic situational awareness, and computer vision, and perhaps most importantly, natural language processing, means that now we can work with AI in a more collaborative manner.
“And it doesn’t require coding skills.”
Employers and business leaders trying to ensure their workforces have all the skills needed to keep up with these new technologies can be tricky.
“The problem is that whilst they’re putting out a lot of AI literacy courses, workers need to understand how to use the tool in their context,” says Dr Mason.
“The risks, the benefits and the choices they have to make need to be tailored to that context. So the way in which I use AI is probably very different from how you use AI and building that understanding when the tools on offer are changing from week to week, it seems, is incredibly hard.”
To address this, Dr Mason says organisations may benefit from having an AI expert onboard who keeps abreast of emerging technologies and developing regulations to help navigate the workforce through these changes.
“The federal government is now requiring all [its] agencies to have a nominated person who’s responsible for looking after AI and responsible AI adoption,” she says.
She says more organisations are doing this with the aim of having someone there to make sure AI is being used in a way that’s creating productivity gains but not suddenly exposing them to new, unforeseen risks.
“[Leaders] need to be recruiting to have someone in the organisation who’s on top of not just what you can do with these tools, but the issues you need to be aware of when thinking about what kind of data to share with a generative AI tool.”
Human strengths to invest in
For employers trying to work out what skills they should be recruiting for in an AI-powered world, Dr Mason says humans have capabilities that allow them to handle complex situations that a computer program – no matter how sophisticated – cannot.
“Humans can deal with novel situations,” she says.
“AI cannot respond appropriately to a task or an issue that it hasn’t been exposed to before. It relies on existing data to determine the correct response.
“But the AI can draw upon a much larger range of data and respond much faster, so it’s much more efficient. It’s better at repetitive, rule-based tasks than a human who suffers from things like attention sometimes or social influence.
“[The AI] can understand the objective that the human is trying to achieve and respond to prompts and feedback from the human about how it can improve upon or build upon the work over time – so that eventually the human and the artificial intelligence are producing an output that neither the human or the AI could have produced on their own.
“The question is whether eventually in three to five years, the AI will be able to do it. But so far, there are just too many tasks that you can’t bundle very easily to make it possible for the AI to do mostly by itself.
“A surgeon can use a cobot to assist it with a particular operation, but there’s too many aspects around what the surgeon’s doing that the cobot still can’t do.
“And similarly, while in a classroom generative AI can act as a fantastic personalised tutor for individual students, there are still so many contextual influences that the AI doesn’t understand, but only a human understands [from their] learning over a lifetime.”
So what kind of human strengths and capabilities are vital in this world?
Dr Mason says analysis of work skills before and after the pandemic shows there was a rise in the need for tech skills as workforces went remote, driving up the use of apps like Zoom and Teams.
But skills around relationships, connection and communication have long been on the rise.
“There was a big lift in demand for interpersonal skills, and that’s part of a long-term change that’s been happening over decades,” she says.
“Increasingly interpersonal skills are important because that’s how we complement the technology, because most of us work in the services sector now and that means we’re delivering services to people and that requires interpersonal skills.
“That requires communication and collaboration and working with others.
“The demand for digital skills dropped off after the pandemic, but the demand for interpersonal skills is still increasing over time.”
Inspiring teams to embrace change
Smith says one of the most important skills for leaders right now is knowing how to lead their workforce through change and uncertainty.
“Change is constant – and it’s faster than ever before,” she says.
“It can feel a little bit scary to people and a bit unknown, but actually [AI] is a huge opportunity.”
When adopting new technologies and leading a workforce through a period of change, Smith says it’s important to start with a strong vision and paint a clear picture of the destination for people.
Communicating this and the organisation’s case for change is only part of the next step because leaders at all levels must also be aligned on the vision and should actively work to reinforce the changes being made.
“There’s a huge amount that you need to do to help [employees] through the change curve,” she says.
“Change is always going to be faced with resistance. People are built to want to maintain the status quo.
“When you get resistance, that means people know you’re serious, so don’t be afraid. Lean in to engaging with your teams, be transparent about what we collectively are running for, here’s what we’re trying to achieve, but we need to do it together.
“Take the time to listen to their concerns and answer their questions, and make sure their immediate managers are doing the same.
“So it’s bringing them on the journey and making them feel like they’re part of it.
“Finally, it’s about understanding and providing the support they need to change – training, coaching, new tools, new ways of working – and celebrating and reinforcing new ways of working as people experiment and then adopt new ways of doing things.”
Job security in an AI-powered world
There have been lots of conversations and predictions made about job security in an AI-driven world.
Smith says the data suggests the creation of opportunities and new jobs that don’t currently exist may balance the number of roles where AI will replace humans.
She likens it to the gig economy which has exploded since the emergence of platforms like Uber, which helped unlock a global market for flexible, on-demand work.
“Although we had freelance contract work long before this, it really changed the level of demand, accessibility and ways of working,” says Smith.
“Uber also dramatically changed the role for many taxi drivers – the work didn’t go away, just significantly changed in nature and brought in many new people.”
Similarly, she says there is exponential opportunity for new markets across a wide range of industries with AI.
“It’s going to create jobs and opportunities in new business models that we haven’t thought about before.”