All types of business skills and situations will be practiced with AI apps. Even the highest paid occupations will be supplemented by AI. Positions like lawyers, professors, physicians, sales and many others will be supplemented. AI will be used for text mining and lead generation leaving the professionals to assume higher cognitive roles. The shift in focus will be toward work of higher value. These shifts will not be without challenges. Soft skills, from running meetings to coaching, to interviewing and providing feedback will be able to be practiced in a safe environment with the intent of teaching human to human interactions. The knowledge domains will expand and include diagnosis if you are a doctor and selling skills if you are a sales person. The workplace will be influenced by multiple convergences of technologies, not one single technology. This will advance when business needs line up with technological possibilities. The workplace trends to watch for integrating AI, are the convergence points between business needs and redundant cognitive skills and services. Talent development will have the opportunity to create new processes, applications and solutions as technologies change the roles and interactions of employees (Gerlind Wisskirchen, 2017).
An agile workplace is one that moves quickly and easily, adapts to varying situations and is perceptive and fluid. It is a workplace that adapts easily to changes. Everything is different, every day and that’s the way it flows. It welcomes change. It supports collaboration and interaction. It is built around motivated and intelligent humans who should and can be trusted. It adapts to regularly changing circumstances. The ability to automate job tasks has less to do with high wage vs low wage occupations and more to do with redundancy and change. Home health care worker, landscapers, maintenance workers, social workers and other occupations that deal with an environment of constant change and challenge are less likely to be influenced by AI. The ability to create and interact with human emotion is difficult to automate. Creativity and spontaneity are currently required in only 4% of activities across the US economy. Only 29% of activities require sensing human emotion (Michael Chui, 2015). Both blue collar and white collar workers will be affected. The faster the process steps can be described in detail and are repetitive, the sooner the employee can be replaced with AI (Gerlind Wisskirchen, 2017)
Agility in the workplace means both flexibility and configurability. Flexibility is the organizations ability to make adjustments to the customers’ needs and configurability is the ability to adjust to changing demands. Agile work environments can and usually do support multiple intelligent agents in the supply chain. These agents can be involved in one or more activities but are flexible enough to adjust and reconfigure based on changing circumstances (Ping Lou, 2004).
Agile, which originally applied mainly to manufacturing environments, now encompasses all types of workplaces. It describes the enterprise in terms of the collection of business processes. These time ordered sets of activities or tasks, are combined to produce desired results. Many organizations have virtual partners in their supply chain because of the agility and flexibility involved. An agile work environment moves forward in terms of production of goods and services but also feedback relevant information and data. Practices common to agile work environments include JIT (just in time), TQM (time quality management) information sharing, decision support systems and other practices normally associated with a “lean” organization (Mostafa, 2015).
Agile organizations are required to react or respond to what is happening in the game and also be flexible enough to rewrite the long term playbooks. It has to accept the premise of continual improvement. This implies that the business process has to be flexible enough to allow change and reaction to specific situations. This is supported by a continuous improvement in business processes and the use of datamining technologies and AI (Simon Brander, 2011).
Better education will help the adaption of AI but only under certain circumstances. Education itself will undergo a major metamorphosis. Qualifications will be connected to the work and jobs like accountant will surely be done by intelligent software. As long as education teaches and promotes creativity and flexibility it will still be important. Expectations of employees will be greater but less rigid. Availability expectations will be much higher. Flexible hours and stand by duties will be the rule, not the exception (Gerlind Wisskirchen, 2017).
