Nostradamus, the French astrologer and prophet, despite dying in the 1500s, has been credited with referencing several world events up to and including current times. Although he didn’t specifically predict artificial intelligence (AI), the interpretations of his cryptic writings often focus on themes of advanced technology, automation, and potential societal disruption. AI is now exploding before our eyes and creating questions around the benefits and risks for business.
The Business Benefit of AI
Everyone has some impact or implication of AI at the top of their minds. Mine is the customer service function, specifically the call centre business. In the dim and distant past, I was responsible for a consumer-facing business employing more than 1,000 call centre agents spread over multiple call centre locations, mainly in Eastern Canada. Providing high quality, consistent levels of customer care was one of the greatest challenges my business faced. The quality of service we provided frequently fell short of the standards we wanted for our customers, and as any good businessperson should know, providing poor service ultimately costs more (often significantly more) than providing good service. We continually struggled to train our agents and give them the best possible systems to support them. Our marketing team raised the stakes with frequent new acquisition and retention offers, all of which had to be scripted, systems coded, and agents trained to support our customers. It was a never-ending challenge: one we never seemed to be able to master.
AI has the capability to revolutionize such customer service functions. Training a large language model (LLM) to understand every possible customer service situation and how to respond to it is eminently achievable. Linking an LLM to voice recognition and voice synthesis technology would enable it to listen to and converse with a customer in their preferred language, even matching their local accent. Online “chat” style conversations are easy for today’s AI engines. Even video chatting can be supported with AI-generated virtual agents. If I were still in charge of that business, I would be jumping into AI with both feet. I would be chasing the dual targets of massive customer service improvement and significantly reduced cost to serve.
There are hundreds of opportunities beyond customer service for AI to positively impact businesses, from marketing (AI analysis of customer data to put the most appropriate sales message in front of a customer) to finance (AI detection of fraudulent activity), and HR (scanning resumes to shortlist candidates for a new role). The potential benefits are simply too attractive for most businesses to ignore, so the answer to the question: “Should the average business get on board?” must be a resounding yes.
Unresolved Questions about AI
Although the potential benefits of AI are indisputable, several questions remain unresolved:
Labour market impact: In the customer service example set out above, AI will likely displace most of the call centre agents my business used to employ. That potentially impacts more than 1,000 jobs. In March 2023, Goldman Sachs reported: “Generative AI could expose the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs to automation… if generative AI delivers on its promised capabilities, the labor market could face significant disruption”. Even earlier, in 2020, the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report stated: “By 2025, 85 million jobs may be displaced by a shift in the division of labor between humans and machines.” It’s indisputable that the labour market is already changing – graduate unemployment is rising and major employers are predicting shrinkage of their workforces – and AI is acknowledged to be a significant factor. Optimists will say that it’s just another labour market revolution, like the industrial revolution or the introduction of the internet. They say AI will create new jobs to replace those that are lost, which is undoubtedly true, but to what extent? Does our society have an education system capable of transitioning those 1,000 call centre agents into the type of jobs that AI will enable?
Economic impact: Huge investments are going into AI to build the enormous data centres and fund the technology development that will be needed. Tech businesses such as Alphabet (Google), Open AI (ChatGPT), Microsoft, and others are fighting for a leadership position, but whichever tech behemoths win this race, there’s no doubt they will want a return on their investment. Instead of the salaries of 1,000 call centre agents, my old business will be paying license and usage fees to one tech company or another. How will that economic activity impact society? Will governments tax the profits that these businesses derive from AI and use the tax proceeds to fund those displaced from the workforce?
Geopolitical impact: Western governments are not intervening materially in the AI revolution. They seem to be taking the view that there’s a global race for AI dominance and any attempt to regulate or control what’s happening would hobble their chances of coming out of the race at the top of the pile. Can we expect more active intervention as the labour market and economic impacts become more evident?
The business community is in an interesting place right now; there’s an obvious and urgent need to explore what AI can do, if only to avoid being left behind by competitors. At the same time, society has yet to develop compelling answers to these difficult questions. It will be tempting for business leaders to take the view that they shouldn’t worry about what they cannot control – Surely those 1,000 soon-to-be out-of-work call centre agents are society’s problem once they’re off the payroll? I would argue this attitude is short-sighted and neglects the role of business leaders to contribute to the society in which they operate. The advice to business leaders must be to jump into AI with enthusiasm, but to do so with caution and a real engagement with the societal challenges that are likely to arise.
Written without the use of any AI tools.
Gary Smith
Senior Advisor
