Human skills and AI skills complement each other. With the right skills, humans can support and even improve AI functionality. Here are three such human skills with which companies need to prepare their workers: Companies need to prepare workers with these human skill skills to:
- Train AI to do the work desired, such as recognizing human expressions, detecting disease, supporting financial decisions, and interacting with humans in optimal ways.
- Explain to those not expert with AI the behavior and processes by which AI generates conclusions and actions.
- Sustain AI systems within the responsible, safe, and appropriate parameters of their functionality.
Wilson and Daugherty also cite AI skills by which AI will expand human abilities. Each offers a positive development of specific worker competency. Smart machines possess the skills to
- Amplify analytics and decision-making by offering the right information at the right time. Imagine feeding data criteria to an application capable of offering countless designs – window frames, for instance. While AI performs the calculations, the human applies professional judgement and aesthetic sensibility.
- Interact with employees and customers in innovative, effective ways. Consider auto-transcribing, voice search, and chatbots as examples.
- Embody context-aware abilities allowing the collaborative robot (cobot) to work cooperatively alongside humans. For example, a cobot that folds and tapes cardboard boxes frees the human worker to monitor, adapt, and redirect the assembly process.
Companies intent on digital success in 2020 and beyond must tend to both skill sets: first, skills the human needs to strengthen and safeguard AI engagement and second, the professional development the human gains from working with smart machines. Skills training for the first skillset will give workers confidence. Attention to the second set of workforce attitude skills can generate comfortable acceptance.
Summary: Action Items for Planning
We combine the action points offered in Part 1 with two further points here. Planning for technological change must include attention to changes that impact the workforce and how to make those changes not only acceptable but favorable to those most affected. The workforce is most affected, immediately, by the global transition to AI and automation. We suggest these four actions for every business experiencing or expecting introduction of artificial intelligence.
- Project the degree and rate that AI will increase within your company
- Identify the specific changes AI will generate by changing the assignment of tasks: machine tasks as opposed to cognitive tasks
- Open communications to learn how workers anticipate the shift to AI
- Prepare for ample opportunities for employees to learn and develop skills and acceptance relevant to human-machine partnerships