Gartner Identifies the Human Touch as the Strongest Element in AI

CIOs need to prepare workers for a future in which people do more creative and impactful work because they no longer have to perform many routine and repetitive tasks, according to Gartner. People and machines are entering a new era of learning in which artificial intelligence augments ordinary intelligence and helps people realize their full potential.

AI will change the workforce, but its impact will not be detrimental to all workers. According to a Gartner survey conducted in the first quarter of 2018 among 4,019 consumers in the U.K. and U.S., 77 percent of employees whose employers have yet to launch an AI initiative expect AI to eliminate jobs. But the same survey found that only 16 percent of employees whose employers have actually adopted AI technologies saw job reductions, and 26 percent of respondents reported job increases after adopting AI.

People will learn how to do less routine work. They will be trained in new tasks, while old tasks that have become routine will be done by machines. There are, for example, cases in which consulting an AI system has saved money, time and distress. Not consulting an AI system may actually become unethical in the future in the field of medicine, for example. Although AI will give employees the time to do more, organizations will need to train and retrain their employees in anticipation of AI investments.

CIOs are likely to be the leader or instigator of AI initiatives in their organization. While machine learning focuses on creating new algorithms and improving the accuracy of “learners“, the machine teaching discipline focuses on the efficacy of “teachers.“ The role of teacher is to transfer knowledge to the learning machine, so that it can generate a useful model that can approximate a concept. Machine learning models and AI applications derive intelligence from the available data in ways that people direct them to do. CIOs believe bots will be integral to our daily lives, wherever we would ‘rather have a bot do it.