Will AI really replace your job? CEOs don’t appear to imagine so.
“I talk to a lot of CEOs and I learned very quickly that they don’t think about AI replacing us – I can say that with complete conviction,” said Ronnie Sheth, CEO of SENEN GROUP, a strategic consulting firm based in Austin, Texas, whose core business helps corporations integrate AI into their workflows. Sheth spoke to Assets in regards to the dangers and potential of AI implementation during an interview at London Tech Week earlier this month.
The fear and speculation that AI will steal jobs has crept into every industry. Amazon recently laid off over 100 customer support employees, Fortunes Jason Del Rey reported that this is an element of the continuing effort to cut back costs and put money into automation. New reports from the New York Times and Citigroup are each warning entry-level bankers and financiers in regards to the risk of being replaced, and just last month, Kai-Fu Lee, CEO of Sinovation Ventures, said he expects AI to exchange 50% of human jobs in the following decade.
But individual CEOs may remain cautious, says Sheth. She named a big construction company that could be a SENEN customer. “I just spoke to their CEO, who – obviously as a construction manager – is thinking about robots and AI algorithms that could be used for some of the menial work on site.” The boss was not convinced, she says. “Many workers asked him if AI would affect their work. He told them, ‘No, but it will increase your safety.’ So CEOs think about it differently. And that’s the right way to think about it.”
Perhaps that is little consolation for CEOs who worry about their very own advantages and fear that they themselves might at some point get replaced. Again, Sheth is not frightened – a minimum of not for the effective leaders.
“As CEO, my job is to do several things,” Sheth said. “Manage the company culture. Lead the company in a direction where it doesn’t go bankrupt. Drive sustainable growth. Really improve the community I serve.”
Sheth said many CEOs care more in regards to the human features of business, resembling branding and customer loyalty, than about nitty-gritty numbers.
Their clients – from Fortune 500 corporations like Nike and IBM to start-ups and NGOs – were willing to desert their short-term revenue and growth goals to speculate in sustainable, viable brand expansion.
“I won’t name names, but there are some very, very large retail brands we’ve worked with that have fallen on interesting times because they decided to just go with AI and forget about their brand,” Sheth said. “Not a good idea. They need to backtrack on branding.”
Replacement theory
In the short term, no jobs might be “really and successfully replaced,” Sheth predicted. “But if we think 10, 15, 20 years into the future – maybe assembly line jobs? Maybe some accounting, maybe just some basic marketing, data entry administrative work.”
Sure, she said, these might be replaced or outsourced, but that does not imply the individuals who have been doing those jobs don’t have any other options. “I think there’s a balance between re-orienting the workforce and putting policies in place that ensure AI is used for the benefit of people and doesn’t take away people’s livelihoods.”
It is the responsibility of business leaders – and even government officials in the general public sector – to take into consideration the way to mitigate the impact of AI on professionals, Sheth said. And he went a step further: “I don’t think any company that says it wants to be AI-centric or data-driven is on the right track,” Sheth said. “You are not value-driven and you are not value-centric. You are what you focus on.”
The dangers that data poses to people
Over the years, Sheth’s company has carried out projects with large corporations. She noticed: “The 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-centric,’ are doomed to failure.”
This failure is as a result of a one-sided mindset that focuses on numbers slightly than people. “On the other hand, companies say, ‘We have all this data, but now how can we add value to the company, to our customers, to our employees, to our community?’ That’s a different mindset.”
The difference between the 2, she said, is on the lookout for a solution to the way to develop into data-centric, not about unlocking value for the person. “As business leaders, we really need to focus on making sure that policy and regulation are very, very, very explicit about human-centricity, and we need to make sure that AI is not hindering human innovation,” Sheth said. “Right now, we’re seeing a lot of fear-based regulation and fear-based policymaking. I really want to see innovation come through without compromising human value.”
