AI is often portrayed as a job thief, with cost-cutting employers eager to replace human labor with machines that don’t demand vacations, sick pay, or lunch breaks. However, next-generation AI tools don’t make your job harder, on the contrary, they help you do it better.
From helping you make lucrative contracts, to finding new design inspiration, to writing tricky formulas for spreadsheets, artificial intelligence helps people succeed in business and avoid some of the daily chore. And these are everyday tools that just about anyone can use, not the very expensive tools only technologists can access.
Here’s how AI is already helping people do their jobs better, and how it can help you.
How can artificial intelligence improve your business?
Anyone who has played with ChatGPT, OpenAI’s new chatbot, will know that it has an extraordinary ability to communicate just like a human. From writing blog posts, poetry, ad slogans and lyrics, there is almost nothing ChatGPT can’t write.
Search engine expert Danny Richman quickly realized that ChatGPT could use his persuasive speaking skills to help a self-employed shopkeeper with communication difficulties. “I was mentoring my friend Ben to help him get his swimming pool and landscape business, Ashridge Pools, off the ground,” Richman said. “Ben suffers from dyslexia and has trouble responding to emails from clients and preparing professional estimates.
“Initially Ben was sending his emails to me to be rewritten. Later I realized that OpenAI’s GPT-3 can save us a lot of time. I created an application that allows Ben to send his message to a Gmail account. Then I send the original message and the professional and receives an email containing an AI-generated version written in a business-like fashion.”
For example, Ben might reply: “Sally, I’m starting work on yours on Monday” and the artificial intelligence will say, “Dear Sally, I hope this email finds you well. I’m writing to let you know that I will start working with you on Monday. I really can’t wait to get started.”
The app had a huge impact on Ben’s ability to communicate with customers. He also helped secure a contract worth £200,000. Mr. Richman is working with OpenAI to make a version of his app available for free to anyone suffering from dyslexia. But you can ask ChatGPT to write you similar emails for free today.
making art with AI
AI isn’t just adept at extracting text – it has a creative side, too. Recent versions of leading image editing software Photoshop use “AI” to remove unwanted objects from photos and fill the image with what may be there. It can even enlarge an image using AI to fill in what isn’t captured by the camera.
Then there’s the AI’s ability to create images from text-only descriptions. Tools like Midjourney and DALLE-2 have swallowed tens of millions of online images. When someone asks them to draw, for example, ‘A sunset over Paris’ or ‘a chimpanzee playing football in a pop art style’ (see image above), they can do it because they have learned what is what. These scenes and objects look alike.
Ed Bolton is the brand’s creative director at Frog, a creative consulting firm that is part of Capgemini Invest. His company already makes good use of such AI tools to brainstorm creative ideas for new projects or create bespoke sentiment boards that can inspire creative people.
He believes “prototypers” who use text commands to create an AI image could be a future career. “Creative AI will help automate many tasks while being a great tool that can offer unlimited inspiration for creative thinking,” he said. “And with that extra time and access to unlimited inspiration, creatives can focus on injecting more spirit into the creative process, believing that creative AI will never succeed.”
It’s not just the visual arts that benefit from the instillation of artificial intelligence. Tools like SoundRaw or Boomy used artificial intelligence to create music. It may not make chart-topping songs, but if you need a lively, life-affirming song playing in the background of an online ad, for example, such tools can produce just the right length of music on demand.
Have the AI write the code for you
While the creative abilities of the AI are amazing, they are incredibly useful for chewing up more mundane, everyday tasks.
ChatGPT, for example, is equally suitable for writing Excel spreadsheet formulas at home or HTML code for websites, as are Shakespeare-like sonnets. For employees who don’t have the coding skills to perform such tasks themselves, this can be extraordinarily useful and a huge time saver. Ask ChatGPT to “write, for example, an Excel formula that averages the monthly sales figures in column B excluding August numbers in cell B9” and it will do this and even explain how to adapt the formula yourself.
But danger lurks here. For example, anyone who writes code for a website will know that a small tweak can bring down the entire design, with a small change in one part of the code having a domino effect on the rest.
There are also security risks to having AI write code. When the latest version of ChatGPT was released, security researchers soon discovered that it could be used to write code that would launch a denial-of-service attack on websites. This fills them with so much traffic that they collapse under the weight. The makers had to patch quickly to prevent AI from being used for such malicious purposes – a reminder that AI is only as ethical as the people who instruct it.
AI skills you will need
While there are countless ways AI can help people be more productive, there’s no doubt that it also remains a threat. This includes facing many knowledge workers potentially being replaced by algorithms.
This is why many people decided to get ahead of the game and develop their own AI skills. According to the CFA Institute’s Future of Skills report, nearly one-fifth of financial professionals are developing their own AI and machine learning skills to stay relevant in the workplace of tomorrow.
AI can even help identify hidden human abilities. “Finding the best and most desirable candidates from people who are not actively looking for a new job is one of the biggest recruitment challenges of the modern age, and an AI is perfectly positioned to solve it,” said Ben Keighley, founder of social media recruiting. firm Socially Recruited.
Armed with a wish list from employers, AI can be used to intelligently target the ideal candidates for each job through custom ads. Machine learning then ensures that the campaigns are optimized so they appear at the perfect time to grab their attention.
“Instead of standard job posting boards or portals, artificial intelligence places these ads on social media feeds that people scroll through every day. This means passive talents that are otherwise unattainable can be deployed and turned into active applicants.”
So if you see a job posting appearing in your Twitter feed, chances are you’re headhunted by AI.