What if AI took over your job—but not in the potentially dystopian way that has spun around some news cycles. What if AI instead took over all of the tedious and painful tasks that tie up workers’ time, freeing them to do the more fulfilling, and more human, aspects of their jobs.
It’s possible, according to Adam Famularo, CEO of WorkFusion, an organization that does just that—deploying digital workers to support financial functions with time-consuming tasks, from AML compliance to transaction screening.
How is the future of work unfolding?
Generative AI is the biggest transformation enabler since the internet. Companies need to prepare now for how AI will impact their business. Whether you’re ready for it or not, AI will be a part of our daily work lives.
The adoption of AI in the workplace will grow exponentially over the next few years and will redefine work teams, as AI and humans work side by side to get work done in fusion teams.
Companies today are navigating an ever-changing list of macroeconomic conditions, including the labor crisis and looming recession. Innovative companies are exploring their options with technology, such as how to better empower and grow existing employees and how to automate lower value work to improve the employee experience, uplevel job skills and training, and reduce burnout—since AI can do the more mundane and painful parts of a job that no one wants to do.
For example, the banking and financial services industry is leaning into AI adoption. While historically resistant to change, many government agencies, regulatory partners and financial crime watchdogs are currently pushing the sector toward innovative approaches to solve financial crime and anti-money laundering compliance problems. They are using technology, including AI, to liberate and improve human intervention and judgment. And regulators are increasingly warming up to leveraging AI to reduce compliance risks, capacity savings and costs.
What strategies do you recommend for leaders to embrace AI?
We have entered the AI revolution, and there is no turning back. AI is impacting every industry and holds the promise to transform how we live, learn, think and work. By investing in AI, companies invest in their business and people. Companies that don’t are destined to fail.
Now is the time for leaders to fully lean in and develop an AI strategy. Here are some key recommendations for leaders:
- Clearly define the objectives and goals for AI. Whether it’s improving operational efficiency, enhancing customer experience or driving innovation, having well-defined objectives will guide the AI implementation process.
- Identify specific areas or processes where AI can bring significant value. Focus on use cases that align with the company’s objectives and where AI technologies can address specific pain points or challenges, such as increasing team capacity, raising productivity, reducing human error and improving compliance.
- Take the initiative to understand the basics of AI technologies, their capabilities and their potential impact on your industry.
- Prepare employees for AI integration and address potential concerns or resistance. Communicate the benefits of AI in enhancing job roles, reducing repetitive tasks and creating new opportunities for skill development.
By embracing these, leaders can effectively navigate the AI landscape, drive successful AI adoption and position their organizations for growth, innovation and competitiveness in the AI-driven era.
How will AI fuel a shift in how work is done?
AI is radically changing the nature of work and will create many new jobs and roles. While innovation can often make jobs obsolete, automation simultaneously creates more jobs. For example, new engineering jobs are emerging, such as automation engineers and machine learning engineers, as well as supporting roles in IT and other areas.
According to the World Economic Forum, technology will create 97 million new jobs by 2025. That combined with the global talent shortage, opens AI solutions such as an AI digital workforce. Organizations can “hire” AI to do highly skilled work, freeing their employees to do what humans do best, create, strategize and innovate.
When humans work alongside AI, speed and processing also increase exponentially. Consider how easy it is to make a mistake and miss something when sifting through and deciphering mountains of data. AI can explain its decisions and provide detailed documentation, ensuring strong audit trails. This capability is helpful to organizations in highly regulated industries.
How is AI helping companies overcome recruitment and retention issues?
Businesses are struggling to find talent. There is simply too much work to do and not enough people to do it. AI is helping solve this staffing challenge by enabling organizations to augment their teams with AI digital workers.
From a recruitment standpoint, think about how automation can help source quality candidates, speeding up the interview pipeline so companies can focus more time with candidates to ensure they are the right fit. Once hired, AI can help with the many repetitive and tedious onboarding processes.
AI can also make employees’ jobs better and reduce turnover. By freeing employees from tedious manual tasks that tend to be error-prone, companies can help their employees do more strategic and satisfying work and focus on more valuable projects, offering new prospects for promotion. This, in turn, leads to better morale, higher employee satisfaction and better employee retention in the company.
Take, for instance, the sanctions screening role in banks. This position involves reviewing a large number of alerts related to individuals on a government sanction list. The primary task of the employee is to quickly assess the alerts and determine whether they are false positives, which comprise approximately 99 percent of the alerts. Although this role is critical to a financial institution, it may not be particularly fulfilling for an employee who may become bored and exhausted, ultimately leading them to seek a more satisfying job.
