If you invest more in AI than people, you’re doing it wrong
Koenraad Schelfaut
Accenture
For organizations, it’s crucial to begin with your existing workforce and demystify AI developments. Be transparent with your strategy, share examples of how gen AI amplifies human abilities, and emphasize how the benefits created by your organization will be used to invigorate training and development.
Start by carefully speaking with your people about gen AI. Yes, it can create more productivity and boost capacity, but companies can’t plug-and-play gen AI to improve their bottom line in the short term. The effectiveness of it hinges on engaged and thoughtful human input.
In the area of customer care, for example, many people’s roles are changing due to automation and gen AI. Since these types of employees spend the majority of their time talking to customers, they have rich language and communication skills and are adept at working with customers across numerous situations to find mutually agreeable solutions. Now they may find that their work increasingly involves channeling more online requests to chat bots.
Their experience and skills lend themselves to a new function: prompt engineering, the process of designing and refining text prompt inputs to improve the outputs of AI models. We’re even finding that former customer-service employees are often much better at working and interacting with LLMs than programmers. More accurate LLMs lead to more accurate gen AI solutions that have a positive impact on customer service and a company’s bottom line.
Despite this, Accenture’s Pulse of Change Survey shows that while 94% of the C-suite intends to increase technology investments this year, only 26% of that investment will be focused on workforce reskilling. In 2023, only 5% of enterprises trained their entire workforce to work with gen AI. We encourage companies to reinforce their own workforce with new skills that are integral to getting the most out of the technology. These figures demonstrate the urgency we face in workforce reskilling.
The diversity dividend
As our Tech Vision report points out, we’re seeing for the first time a generation of technology that’s more intuitive, both in design and its nature, which demonstrates more human-like intelligence that’s easy to integrate across every aspect of our lives. With these advances, companies need to ensure such tools are being created with responsible AI principles built in, working across governance, risk management, accountability and explainability.
