A recent quote regarding Artificial Intelligence (AI) stated, “Children in schools today don’t need to learn lessons; they need to learn prompts”.
This statement reflects the state of the modern world in terms of how mainstream AI has become.
Traditional lessons now seem obsolete with AI tools becoming more prevalent in both the classroom and working world.
Students, or rather people, nowadays don’t need to learn the long or complex way of learning and doing. Instead, with AI, the right prompt gives you the answers you’re looking for, in record time.
With Harvard University now reporting that 70% of today’s organizations incorporate AI into their operations, it raises the questions – how far is too far?
Do the benefits of AI outweigh the concerns? Should ethical considerations be adopted, despite the numerous benefits companies seem to enjoy with AI?
Advantages of AI in the workplace
Whether there is a cause for ethical concern or not, the advantages of AI use in the workplace are undeniable:
Manages time-consuming tasks
Before profit can be realized, companies must complete a wide range of processes and tasks.
Traditionally, these tasks would be completed by human workers – interns, entry-level staff, consultants or part-time employees.
AI has elevated the productivity and efficiency by which many companies now perform these tasks.
Whether, it’s establishing daily KPIs, brainstorming innovation ideas for a marketing campaign, crafting daily report or weekly schedules, tasks that were formerly mundane and time-consuming are now completed within minutes, or less.
This enables companies to preserve their most precious resource – time and divert their energies and resources elsewhere.
Cost-effectiveness
A key rule of the working world is you save time; you save money.
In a world where time equals money, using AI tools save many companies from expenses they would have incurred from hiring and paying staff.
By reducing the need for human intervention, companies can expect their budgets to be less stretched and maintain greater control over their expenditures.
For example, in manufacturing companies, AI already can streamline quality control procedures using pattern recognition and other techniques when it comes to product development.
The result becomes a higher quality product with less wastage.
Similarly, in the Caribbean banking sector, virtually all customer-related operations are now online, digitalized and controlled by machine-learning AI algorithms.
Banking customers very rarely, would have to visit a physical branch for transactional banking activities. This streamlined use of AI for banking as well as other sectors, means that customers do not have to rely solely on human intervention to experience a quality service.
This is a cost-effective strategy for these banking organizations as they experience reduced costs in salaries, paperwork, office supplies and time.
More informed and improved decision-making.
A major area where businesses tend to utilize AI tools more heavily is data management.
Sales and marketing departments for example, use AI tools to research and gain insights on customer preferences, market trends and buyer behavior. With these insights, companies can segment their target audience and create personalized marketing strategies to engage customers.
With predictive analysis capabilities, AI tools can also be used by management to analyze historical data to predict future outcomes. AI can look at a company’s past sales performance, identify spots for improvements and generate sales forecasts to help managers make more informed and reliable decisions.
Ethical considerations for AI in the workplace
AI tools do provide companies with advantageous capabilities. However, these increasing capabilities at an astonishing pace, do raise the question – what are the implications for humanity?
Is AI just a high-tech business tool that will remain a supporting resource for companies?
Or does it have the potential to surpass human potential and create issues in terms of control, power dynamics and safety?
Despite its advantages, there is an equal number of concerns about the evolution of AI which raises the following ethical considerations:
Job displacement
From its inception, AI has come under scrutiny for its ability to make human effort obsolete. There have bene ongoing debates globally about what does the future of AI mean for the use of human capital?
Will AI lead to massive unemployment? Will it exacerbate economic inequalities?
Modern thought-leaders contend that there will be job replacements. Unskilled labor jobs and manual roles can and will be delegated to robotic operations.
As the world continues to move from an industrial to knowledge-based economy, some argue that AI has the potential to create more jobs than it replaces.
For example, in the banking example mentioned, ATMs have vastly replaced many of the tasks once performed by tellers or customer service reps.
While many critics would point to this as a clear example of AI’s job displacement, it is also argued that allowing AI to manage customer service operations frees up personnel for other strategic tasks.
For example, AI tools can identify which sales leads delivered to loan officers meet the bank’s lending criteria. Additionally, banks can leverage AI capabilities to open new branches which creates new employment opportunities in tech support, digital communications, and data security.
Cybersecurity and privacy
Security remains an important consideration in terms of how AI manages its information. With the ability to handle and process large volumes of data, it must be ethically considered how sensitive data is collected, stored and utilized.
For example, social media platforms have already implemented policies and restrictions that protect consumer information from unethical data mining.
Customers don’t always feel comfortable if organizations know too much about them or if their information can be accessed without their knowledge.
Within an AI-intensive workplace, preserving data privacy and human rights become paramount.
Spreading misinformation and bias
With many social biases, inaccuracies, conspiracies and prejudices available across today’s politics, media and business landscape, it is essential that human vigilance and countermeasures are implemented and run alongside AI operations.
This is to ensure companies gather and evaluate information of integrity. Decisions should be made using accurate data. Companies should also not divulge any biased or fabricated content that could create social divisions, customer manipulation or defamatory opinions.
In today’s AI world, the possibilities and opportunities have multiplied for businesses and employees.
While there are notable pros to having AI as a business tool or business partner, ethics should always have a major role in deciding how and why these tools are utilized.
Using AI in the pursuit of profit should not come at the expense of an organization compromising its human capital, data security or reputation.
