AI in the workplace
Artificial Intelligence is completely changing the way companies used to operate. Right from drafting emails to creating copies of market research summaries, AI is revolutionizing the modern workspace in numerous ways. AI in the workplace is being used in multiple ways.
Most commonly, it is used to break down complex financial reports, create a customized sales plan, and serve as a writing assistant. The productivity of the employees increases more than double by the use of AI; however, the use of AI does not always necessarily translate into greater profits for the company.
This finding has given birth to a new debate, and that is, if AI can perform many of the jobs, then is there really a need for human intervention? The answer is yes, humans are still very much relevant in the AI era, as humans are needed to generate quality prompts in order to get quality responses from AI.
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Workplace automation by AI
However, one of the most important questions that has been raised by this finding is whether most of the corporate jobs in the USA are meaningless. The idea of meaningless jobs was first conceptualized by the anthropologist David Graeber, who once famously described that meaningless jobs are the ones that do not create any value in the productive economy, and this is known even by those who are doing them. Just to give more perspective, many employees now secretly use AI in workplaces to create PowerPoint slides.
Creating slides using AI can definitely save a lot of time for employees, but at the end of the day, it does not add any value to the organization. This is mainly due to the fact that no one really reads the redundant slides; however, it drags the length of the meeting. AI has definitely exposed such jobs, which are very redundant in nature and hardly add any value to the organization.
With workplace automation becoming more and more common, it has come to light how unnecessary those tasks were right from the start. This realization can completely change how meaningful jobs are seen in the US economy.
AI tools for employees
It must be noted that AI at work has taken over on a large scale in terms of the number of users; however, it has not taken away a large number of jobs. What this has done is it has increased the efficiency of the workers who had to depend on traditional methods of working, such as drafting an email on their own.
Many AI tools for employees have been designed in such a way that the lives of the employees become easier. For instance, just one quality prompt in ChatGPT can break down complex financial data, saving the time of the user and increasing organizational efficiency in the process. This has given birth to another debate that instead of eliminating unnecessary work, companies might reach a situation where they add up more superfluous tasks to their itinerary, realizing AI is right there as an assistant.
The management should take note of such situations and redesign the processes in such a way that AI is used as an assistant for the most important tasks of the organization, which adds to its productivity. In this way, organizations can reap the maximum out of the use of AI.
AI in corporate America
This brings us down to the burning question of what is the solution to this problem. Experts are firmly of the view that the only way value is going to come in an organization is through firm human involvement, which makes humans irreplaceable.
AI can definitely assist in doing critical organizational tasks such as drafting emails; however, a human still needs to be present to decide which emails are worth the time and effort; it can’t all be done by AI. AI has definitely exposed the hidden inefficiencies in office jobs; however, it has given an important clue as to how new roles should be designed in a way that AI serves as a human assistant and not a replacement.
This approach can change AI in corporate America from a prospective human replacement to a human assistant.Â