Who are you sitting next to? Who are you seeking a decision from? Are you really sure you know? Is that “person” really a “person”? Seems that artificial intelligence (AI) in robot form or chat bots may be more influential and present in everyday work places then anyone could imagine. WARNING; after a few drinks at the bar are you sure you really want to “meet” that person next to you?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is predicted to possibly replace up to 45% of jobs in the next 20 years. Most of the talk of this revolves around lower level jobs such as customer service or repetitive type jobs, but even higher level jobs may be affected (sales analysis?). This is a very insightful read and one wonders where all the jobless people will wind up. (Bill Taylor/CEO)

Imagine a future where the CEO of a manufacturing firm turns to his Chief Innovation Officer and asks:

“Bob, how can we innovate on our product and save 10 per cent of production cost to stay competitive against low-cost firms?”

So far this seems to be a normal conversation that occurs daily across organisations around the world. Except that ‘Bob’ is really an AI computer program on the CEO’s iPhone.

A study from Oxford University says that A.I. will replace up to 45 per cent of jobs within 20 years. There is a lot of talk about how such intelligent systems and chatbots will eliminate low level jobs, customer service and repetitive tasks. Let’s review, as examples, some actual practices where Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already changing the way jobs are performed.

Customer service

Smart

chatbots

are already being used to interact with customers online. They not only repeat pre-defined answers but can actually ‘think’ and help customers order menus at Taco Bell or get tickets from Ticketmaster.

Recruiting and HR

Many of the current functions of a recruiter consist of standard tasks that a smart machine can do as well as a human. Traditionally, recruiters receive the needed requirements for a job, search candidates, screen best fits, check availabilities and then present best candidates back to hiring manager. These five fundamental tasks will be taken over by the ‘AI Recruiter’ in the next few years....

But will A.I. reach the top echelon of innovation jobs too?

While the world seems to agree that repetitive tasks will be outsourced to machines, there is a wrong belief that advisory roles and creative jobs will be safe from A.I. While there is surely a lot of truth to that, there is also a lot of arrogance in such thinking and underestimating the creative power of A.I.

We have seen IBM Watson going into helping and potentially replacing white-collar jobs in financial advisory and health care diagnosis. Ok, but what about innovation? We have been trained about the power of open innovation for enterprises and how accessing creative minds inside and outside the firm is bringing in the ‘unusual suspects’ of disruptive ideas. For a decade the world has been obsessed with how to open up to these creative minds inside a firm and outside to bring in new ideas.......

From crowd-suggested to crowd-scanned

Open innovation takes on a new meaning as AI will analyse what’s out in the open digital world (Internet). Combining internal data and open data will lead to finding the best ideas suggested by the algorithm.

From crowd-suggested to crowd-scanned

, as companies will still be picking up the brains and the intelligence of the outside world and crowd but in a more informed and effective way, avoiding so the issue of Quirky and other similar platforms.... Read Full Article at London School of Economics Business Review