How Investors Can Shape AI for the Benefit of Workers

As the world of work is reshaped by AI, there are opportunities within the critical, fast-growing care sector to enable and support a workforce facing acute shortages.

Copyright: ssir.org – “How Investors Can Shape AI for the Benefit of Workers”

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The world of work is changing. AI’s impact on work and workers is an inescapable conversation right now everywhere from the World Economic Forum and the White House, to American union halls, Fortune 100 board rooms, and VC cocktail parties. AI is poised to alter everything from how customer service questions get answered to diagnosing cancer. Here we will skip the false precision of predicting exactly how many jobs will be dislocated and instead focus on how we can envision and incentivize the beneficial impacts of AI for both workers and society.

As venture investors, we are constantly hunting for big, audacious ideas that can produce outsized returns for our investors. But we also didn’t get into this industry without the fundamental belief that the future can be made better than the present. That’s not techno-utopianism but rather a recognition that there are numerous levers within capital that can shape the future we want to live in. If we choose to use them. And as the world of work is reshaped by AI, we believe there are opportunities within our critical, fast-growing care economy sector to enable and support a workforce with the biggest shortages in the United States.

AI and the Future of Work: What Stays and What Goes?

AI’s fundamental skill is pattern recognition at a staggering scale. This means that many administrative and analytical tasks like note-taking, scheduling, data reconciliation, and summarization will be reduced dramatically. It is true that jobs will be lost in these areas. But the ones that remain may become higher quality and higher paying. For example, think of a nurse manager or a teacher who no longer needs to devote 40% of their time to jockeying a schedule or designing slides and worksheets. Instead, they can lean into the uniquely human elements of their job in ways that require emotional and contextual assessment and insight that technology cannot replicate. AI will isolate and highlight these soft skills in ways that will make them more valuable and potentially higher compensated.

AI also has the potential to lower the barriers to entry to many jobs, including technical ones. We’ve seen this same scenario play out with other technological leaps forward, time and time again. Think of the way online maps and navigation made becoming a London black cab driver more accessible, no longer requiring decades to earn “The Knowledge” of every side street. Now that AI can synthesize huge volumes of information and deliver it at the moment of need—to a technician repairing a downed telephone pole, to a nurse wondering which needle gauge to use, to a young engineer who can automate her code production—the workforce will actually become more fungible.

Der Beitrag How Investors Can Shape AI for the Benefit of Workers erschien zuerst auf SwissCognitive | AI Ventures, Advisory & Research.