Much of the concern about the displacement of jobs by artificial intelligence has so far come from people at the bottom of the workforce. Part of this stems from the belief that AI benefits workers with greater task-based responsibilities versus the broader job responsibilities of higher-level workers (with many experts saying that AI is almost at the level of an intern good). Some derive from this population having more time in the workforce – and from that perspective, more to lose as technology develops over time.
However, 30% of senior employees fear being fired for lacking AI skills, according to a recent report from online tutoring company Preply. But is this concern realistic?
“To the extent that people are eligible to retire, if there’s a big skills gap, you might find people choosing to retire or just find completely different jobs,” said Steve Preston, president and CEO at Goodwill. Industries International, a leading non-profit provider. of educational and workforce-related services. But not everyone in senior positions falls into that camp, he says — and neither do the companies that employ these people want them to leave.
“One of the most devastating forms of employee loss is when you lose institutional knowledge and customer knowledge,” Preston said. “You absolutely want to keep those people and you want to help them be more productive.”
Experienced workers can master AI knowledge
Despite the common stereotype that older workers (who often make up the upper echelon) have a harder time adapting to new technology, Preston acknowledges that these are the workers for whom AI has unique advantages. “If a job requires engagement with AI, I actually think some older workers will be better able to use it to gain knowledge,” he said, “both in terms of researching AI more effectively and in terms of obtaining AI results. -Support the work and the ability to apply judgment to it.”
In other words, someone with a more complex understanding of the business is more effective at applying inputs and evaluating results using knowledge and skills that AI has not mastered (at least not yet).
Jeetu Patel, executive vice president and general manager of security and collaboration at Cisco, says AI is not yet replacing full, complex jobs, but rather tasks. “Over time, will it get good at getting things done? Absolutely,” he said. “But no one knows what the timeline for that will be.”
For the high-end workforce, Patel says the next few years will be more about growth versus any kind of displacement or replacement — assuming, of course, that these workers are willing to meet their employers in the middle and upskill. their hard and soft in the context of an AI-driven workplace.
As technology continues to advance, 57% of industry experts predict an increase in demand for soft skills, according to a report from learning management system platform TalentLMS.
“At the end of the day, every company is a collection of employees, who are all human, and they need to be touched and motivated in a very human way,” said Nikhil Arora, CEO of Epignosis (parent company of TalentLMS). This is something that senior management will need to keep in mind in a modern context as day-to-day roles in the employment architecture change.
The need for reverse mentoring is high
Another strategy for higher-level employees to consider, says Arora, is reverse mentoring, a process in which senior management seeks the perspective of less experienced employees. “A lot of young people who are basically growing up with AI, it’s second nature to them, where a lot of senior executives are probably now learning AI. It’s almost upside down,” Arora said. He is a big believer in always having two sets of mentors, “one who is maybe more seasoned than you and one who is much younger because they are closer to the disruptive technologies and how the new age customers will behave” .
With younger workers as near-native users of AI, creating seniority-agnostic mentoring can enable the organization to innovate at a much faster rate than a top-down strategy. At this point, nearly half (47%) of employees say they still don’t use AI skills in their jobs, according to the 2024 State of Upskilling and Upskilling Report from TalentLMS and Workable. Meanwhile, half agree that their work would benefit from it. Some organizations are starting structured training trips for members of their workforce and customers (Goodwill, for example, received a portion of Google’s $75 million AI Opportunity fund as a grant to spread AI training to the communities they serve).
Generative AI and automated clocks
The reality is that nearly a third of work hours in the US could be automated by generative AI, potentially changing the way many business professionals – including executives and senior managers – do their jobs. Executives at companies like IBM and Duolingo have been vocal about replacing some humans with AI.
In the AI race, firing the wrong people can have unintended consequences, such as the loss of institutional knowledge that can operate in complex, interpersonal environments.
“It would be easy to dismiss older workers and say this is going to be too hard for them, they won’t fit in,” Preston said. “Let’s build on the value of AI to help grow the jobs of the future for older workers, rather than assume that for some reason, it will leave them behind.”