Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a hot topic – and rightfully so. It has (and will continue to) transform how businesses and organizations operate. As a consequence, these companies are looking for employees that know how to best use AI.
The Cost of Not Knowing AI?
In industries that use AI, employees that don’t learn these four new skills will eventually go the way of the dinosaur. However, employees who do learn these skills in their work will stay relevant and continue to be a valuable asset to their company. The four skills are:
1. How to Think Outside the Box
Employees skilled at using AI must not be afraid to try new things; they must have the ability to be innovative, flexible and able to evolve and shift rapidly. This is how businesses will stay relative, current and competitive by implementing and using new AI technology on the fly as new forms of it are developed.
2. How to Optimize Data
AI runs on data -lots o data. So employees that know how to structure data so that AI tools can best use it effectively are a resource that employers need and are looking for. It is an updated version of “garbage in; garbage out”. Structuring data means having the ability to look at data and know how to best evaluate, cleanse and anonymize it so that it makes sense to the AI tools using that data.
3. How to Use AI to Augment Your Job
Knowing how to use data in your job makes you a more valuable employee. For example, knowing how to use AI to do mundane, recurring tasks frees up time for you to do other more important tasks that you otherwise might not have had the time to do – if you know how to use AI.
4. Know How to Prompt AI
Like all tools, the users of AI must know how to structure or word the prompt input so that the results it returns are the results expected. Knowing how to best do this means you can avoid wasting time trying to get an AI tool to do something that it can’t do based on the input you are giving it. Knowing how to prompt an AI tool correctly means you know the risks, viability of the results and that you know how to use the tool responsibly to get the desired outcome from the tool.
Right now, AI works best with a human prompting it to get the desired results for a particular task. That won’t change anytime soon. For employees to increase their value to an employer, learning the four skills in this article will not only provide a higher level of job security, but also a higher wage.
Just how much of a higher wage?
Workers in IT, sales, marketing and operations are jobs set to receive the highest increase in wages; employers are reporting these workers with AI skills can expect to receive a 30% increase on average.
A company called Access Partnership surveyed 1,340 employers and 3,297 employees in healthcare, education and financial services and found that 90% of both employers and employees “expect to benefit from using generative AI as a way to save time, boost creativity and improve business outcomes”. Eighty-four percent of surveyed employees indicated that by acquiring the necessary AI skills, they expect to see positive outcomes on their career of which one would is an increase in pay.
One might think acquiring new skills in AI is limited to the younger generation, but in the survey, 65% of baby boomers and Gen Zers indicated they were interested in learning AI skills as well so that they could stay relevant in their jobs.
AI is taking the world by storm and those that learn the skills on how to use it effectively will be the employees of the future that have secure jobs that pay well. Those that don’t will slowly extinct themselves and will be relegated to low skill, low paying jobs that don’t require the use of AI.
