Is AI coming for your job? Well yes, probably - Ed Broussard

In pretty much every sci-fi movie AI means robots. Intelligent humanoids saving or destroying the world. It makes sense therefore that we all thought the jobs that would disappear to AI first would be the manual ones, physically moving things around whilst humans focused on those “higher value” professional jobs; thinking, reasoning and being creative. Turns out we got it dead wrong, AI is here, and it’s going to completely change what it means to be a professional in the next five years.

AI is much better at thinking than it is at moving. AI can easily traverse the internet and every book ever written, with the ease that you walk across the kitchen. The core strength of today’s AI models, known as Large Language Models, is consuming huge amounts of information and using that to predict the correct answers to questions based on the knowledge.

Think about what most professional jobs are at their core: we learn a specific discipline (law, accountancy, software development, etc), we then consume relevant and time-sensitive information (the specifics of this case), analyse that information against our discipline knowledge, make a decision and choose an action.

​Professionals will need to embrace AI to survive (Picture: stock.adobe.com)

If you follow that template of decision-making, you can see how many complex professions are already being augmented and potentially replaced by AI.

A 2023 study from the University of Warwick demonstrated AI models to be as good as doctors at analysing X-rays. We have seen multiple studies showing AI augmented software developers more than doubling their productivity. Even the Olympics has gotten in on the action, playing AI-generated videos of Olympic athletes from early games, singing along to modern pop classics to keep the crowds entertained at events. A video made in minutes with AI that previously would have taken a team of video animators and editors weeks to create.

However, we’re only at the start of AI transforming professions. Harvey AI, an AI start-up in San Francisco has raised over $200m to train AI models to accurately and consistently complete legal work. Scale.ai has secured over $1.6b to build the technology to allow businesses to utilise their data to create industry-specific solutions.

All of this means it’s vital that companies and professionals to take action now. In five years’ time being “AI literate” will be a base requirement to survive in any professional job. It will be impossible to be competitive in the market without some level of AI augmentation as the cost and human effort to deliver professional services plummets and the expectation of productivity skyrockets.

Ed Broussard, Managing Director at Tomoro.AI

A recent Gartner report showed 87 per cent of CEOs agree that the benefits of AI to their business outweigh its risks, with 36 per cent expecting productivity gains of greater than 15 per cent in the next two years. This feels like a classic example where most of us are over-estimating the impact of AI in the next two years, and massively underestimating the impact over the next decade.

In 2034, life without AI at work, will feel as alien as life without the internet or a smart phone feels today. As a professional the best thing you can do is embrace AI to help you in your job. Those who resist and focus on “how things have always been done” will find themselves in a very difficult place indeed.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Ed Broussard, Managing Director at Tomoro.AI