Should you worry about AI stealing your job or TERMINATING your company?

Ever since ChatGPT was rolled out by Open AI in late 2023, this question has been coming up.
 
I’ve been studying the latest developments in AI, and I can say this: if you’re not worried, you should be.
 
AI is having an exponentially greater impact than off-shoring and BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) trends.
 
With off-shoring, low-paying white-collar jobs were moved from North America to places like India and the Philippines where labor costs were lower.
 
Then with BPO, business functions like accounting, legal, finance, and others were also sent to low-cost labor areas.
 
Following that was the RPA (Robotic Process Automation) trend where manual routine tasks were automated using software.
 
Speaking of robots, do you remember the Terminator movie? Skynet ring a bell?
 
On a serious note, AI is dwarfing the impacts of all these trends. AI can adapt to virtually any scenario through LLMs (Large Language Models) and reinforcement learning. It can be taught to do just about anything humans can do.
 
Also, with text-to-voice and video generation capabilities, AI bots can have actual spoken conversations with humans and people won’t know they’re speaking to a bot.
 
So, watch for AI bots replacing contact centre agents, telemarketers and some low-level salespeople. You’ll see many white-collar jobs being given to AI with many positions eliminated.
 
AI will also optimize functions that were subjected to BPO and RPA. So, pre-AI era companies in these fields are going to face layoffs and many will go out of business.
 
Other companies, particularly service companies whose functions can be performed well by AI (like copywriting, digital marketing agencies) will find their services commodified and many will go out of business.
 
As an employee, leader or business owner, you need to pay attention. This is going to be as impactful as the invention of the wheel. Ignore this and you’ll likely get run over.
 
You’re going to have to find ways to 10X your capabilities leveraging AI – because if you don’t, your competitors will, stealing away all your customers.
 
The winners will be the AI-enabled who can produce real and differentiated results.
 
The AI genie is out of the bottle and there’s no stuffing it back in.
 
Failure to adapt is not an option.
 
Are you ready?

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