People are confused with AI being the future

In many companies, lots of people have started losing their jobs. It is very common and we cannot completely blame AI for that. Maybe to some extent, we can blame Automation for that but, indeed, people can gradually lose their jobs if the manual tasks are automated by some tools. AI is something that is different and it is also better than just automating stuff. As we are in the early stages of AI adoption, there are also misconceptions about AI. People are confused if AI will replace their jobs or not.

From the employee's perspective

People are indeed losing their jobs but we have to understand something AI will override us if we are not up to date. Not just AI but even small automation or an Excel macro can make people lose their job because there is no manual task anymore. It is a trend that any repetitive tasks that are being done by an employee in a company will change in the future and there will be automation done. AI might help there to make it even better. There can be a few steps in the process reduced and those steps might reduce FTE for the company.

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Seeing all these things from the Employee's perspective, it is important to note that we have to keep our skills up to date. We shouldn't be working on a technology that can easily get outdated. We shouldn't be doing jobs that can easily get replaced by a small automation tool or an advanced AI. I remember that before 10 years there was a huge demand for DBAs and many companies were recruiting them in higher numbers but today to take a backup and restore a backup and maintain the servers, there are automations and tools available. There is no need for a DBA to sit and manually take a backup. But these DBAs who have been doing this task manually can learn those tools and also learn how things are being done in the cloud and upskill themselves so that they also travel with the technological advancements.

From the employer's perspective

Any company will want to introduce AI or automation to make sure they can save a lot of money by reducing the number of employees that would be required. Payroll processing companies had to do a lot of manual work back then to process payroll and they had a lot of employees doing manual checks on the payroll data. Today there are tools available to provide payroll data and those tools can validate the data before even getting them and make sure clean data enters the system. This way the manual checking jobs are gone. This saves a lot of money for the employers and they will decide to move in that direction no matter what because they reduce the cost and make a lot more money and the users also get a fast and seamless experience.

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Many companies are also struggling to understand the full capabilities of AI and ML and they are trying to hire resources for some of the projects and later after they find out something, they end up reducing the headcount of the team. This becomes a problem for people because they are hired with lots of hopes and gradually the company realizes that they don't need resources to manage the AI. Some companies even decide against AI as it is not mature enough yet and decide to go for simple automation. Even in this case, the confusion happens and it is hard to decide. This can take a few more years to settle down and only then we will know the real power of AI and ML.