Today's challenge: Working around AI's fuzzy returns and questionable accuracy

It has become difficult to set realistic expectations about artificial intelligence — and this could ultimately confuse efforts to understand the actual value of AI efforts. As the use of technology increases, it means changes in the career landscape for technology professionals, favoring more creative thinkers.

That’s the word from Ajay Malik, former head of architecture and engineering of Google’s Worldwide Corporate Network, and currently CEO of Secomind.ai, who sees a rocky road ahead in the AI space. Perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of AI at this point is setting realistic expectations, he said in a recent podcast hosted by Thomas Erl, president of Arcitura Education. 

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For starters, there isn’t enough measurement or awareness of the potential gains AI is delivering, Malik said. Decision-makers “want to be sure that all the information that they will use internally, or for interacting with customers, is accurate,” he said. “How will companies measure the accuracy of what AI is doing? So AI did something, how do you always know it’s accurate? How can you trust it 100%?”

This weighs on how well business goals can be achieved through AI, Erl said. “If organizations are not successful or if they stumble, or if they invest in AI systems that end up resulting in loss instead of growth, that may postpone or change the outcome of how AI might impact their workforce. They might think, ‘this didn’t work out, let’s go back to human workers.'” But the opportunity is real and we should prepare ourselves for whatever the impact will be.” 

Unfortunately, there are no clear-cut “before-and-after” pictures that graphically illustrate the impact or accuracy of AI, Malik said. To address this, “they need to design built-in verification, built-in explainability, and built-in checks and balances to see if the AI’s answer is correct.” This includes “an alternative path, mechanism, model that provides a technique so that they can verify the answer.”

The key is understanding what exactly the AI system is producing, Malik advised. “Don’t use AI as a black box that you depend upon without even thinking. We are not there today.” In addition, businesses cannot rely on services such as ChatGPT, as responses need to be accurate and free of hallucinations. 

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Instead, he advises, AI systems should have “checks and balances built in, verifying the answers, verifying the data, and offering explainability. There is a term for it called XAI, or explainable AI.”

There are also profound implications for technology-oriented career growth, Malik continued. “There is a big resource shift coming,” he said. Those employees who use AI will become lot more valuable than the employees who do not use AI.”

AI’s impact will be felt in the types of jobs and roles that will flourish in the months and years to come. “Even in software, even in programming, even in testing, a lot of those jobs will get eliminated  — not today, but over time,” Malik predicted. “This is work which the AI can do — very junior level work or very repetitive redundant level of work.”

This will especially apply to coder-level jobs, versus higher-level software engineering jobs, he continued. “Coders are just coding based on some known facts, and programming uses more thinking. In my own company, we see 20 to 25 times higher productivity because of using AI for supporting coding, for supporting meetings, meeting minutes, action items they can do a lot more with less people now.”

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At the same time, there will be a shift toward “the thinkers, the problem solvers, the people who are creative,” Malik added. “AI will take care of the labor, repetitive, or well-defined. But the creative humans will use AI to produce in high velocity and high quality and something really creative. That shift is coming.”