This article originally appeared in The Tennessean.
There’s been much written over the past year about the impact Artificial Intelligence (AI) will have on work as we know it.
Estimates ranging from 20% to 80% of the current human workforce will be made obsolete by AI in the coming years. And some envision an even more dire scenario: as AI improves, there could eventually be no need for a human workforce at all.
I decided to ask the go-to AI bot itself, ChatGPT, what it thought. Its answer wasn’t all that surprising—it doesn’t know.
In my day job as a technology consultant, dealing with rapid change is nothing new. I remember studying day and night to master Novell NetWare (the dominant networking software at the time) only to have it fall out of favor a year later as Microsoft took over. I spent years learning to code in Visual Basic before it was replaced by other programming languages that were more efficient.
The rise of the internet, the migration to the cloud, the demise of Lotus 123 and WordPerfect—when it comes to technology the only thing that is constant is change.
In the tech world, we’re used to this. It’s never easy to adjust to the latest thing every few years. But the mindset has always been to embrace new technologies and leverage them to make life better.
Artificial intelligence is no doubt a dramatic change, but the techie mindset still applies. It’s not just about the threats surrounding AI—but also about the opportunities.
How can AI help our business improve? Can we leverage AI to help us grow? How can we embrace AI to help our employees rather than replace them?
Every company’s answer will be different. For our tech consulting firm that does everything from custom software development to IT support, we have been busy analyzing what AI might do for us.
Here’s a few of the AI opportunities we have come up with so far:
- Sales and marketing. AI will never replace our sales and marketing teams, but it will help them become more efficient. We are already using AI tools to do busy work like transcribing our podcast episodes and speeding up the time it takes to do proposals.
- Developing our own AI products. We have been developing AI-based applications for our clients for the past few years. But as the technology has improved, we have been evaluating what AI products we can build as well. More to come…
- Improving both our own and our clients’ cybersecurity. Security is a never-ending battle. AI will allow our security team to save time on some of the tedious tasks they do now so they can focus more on security strategies. Reviewing audit logs, filtering for false-positive alerts, optimizing Office365 security tasks— AI is already helping us.
- Recruiting and hiring. Most of our recruiting is done manually. We use various job sites and LinkedIn in our quest to find the best people we can to join our team. We are looking at opportunities to use AI to identify potential hires that not only match the skillsets we are looking for, but also fit into our culture.
The list goes on.
Changing with the times is both challenging and intriguing. It’s also critical for businesses to be successful long-term. By viewing AI as an opportunity rather than a threat, our team has become energized and excited about what the future holds.
JJ Rosen is the founder of Atiba, a Nashville custom software development firm and IT support company. Visit Atiba.com for more info.
