When it comes to AI, it’s hard to tell what’s hype and what’s real. Wondering how AI is going to affect your job? Or how to take advantage of AI during your job search? We spoke with David Rombough, Vice President of Customer Experience (CX) Advisory at VXI where he helps businesses leverage advanced technologies like AI, to break it down for you. (Full disclosure: David is a Spot On Talent client.)
To start, David says, you’re already using AI every day. In fact, it probably already makes your job easier. “AI is everything from tools deployed in the background on phones — looking at photos, photo editing — to tools in my Microsoft Office environment to ChatGPT to how do I take a ChatGPT-like thing to drive search,” he says.
But most recent advancements in the technology include dramatic improvements in quality of output. Namely, the ability of large language model (LLM) platforms to correctly generate human-like text, audio, video and art.
6 Things To Know About AI at Work and During a Job Search in 2023
- Expect Business Changes Within 12 to 24 months: It’s a little too early to tell what the impact of recent AI advances will be. However, David noted that the cycles of testing, introducing, and applying AI technologies are getting shorter and shorter. “It just strikes me that our ability to identify the use case, deploy it and move — it happens faster and faster and faster… I think this will start having a massive business impact within the next year or two.
- AI Will Likely Change and Enhance Human Work, Not Replace It: The ability of AI to make predictions, infer context and understand sentiment is powerful. This could help improve your output or the quality of your work many times over. In David’s example, a customer care agent could provide better service. “With new tools, I can provide way better data faster to that agent in real time,” he says, referring to the fact that the software can reference and make sense of information from internal manuals to Reddit posts and external databases in seconds. “We’ve never experienced it. I’m not sure that takes the person’s job away, which is a big fear, but it does fundamentally affect the nature of the work.” Imagine if AI tools actually provided information that was beyond what you could come up with. Understanding the potential applications for AI at your job can make you a more informed employee or candidate during a job search.
- Don’t Expect AI to Create An Award-Winning Document: Can you use ChatGPT to write a blog post or a cover letter? Sure. But the output will be fairly middle-of-the-road in terms of quality. Additionally, it won’t include anything unique to you or your perspective — and it could include errors. “I think what you’ll see over time is it will do the first draft of stuff and then it allows people to clean it up, true it up, make it better,” says David. If you want to leverage ChatGPT for writing your resume during your job search, make sure to do some additional work fine-tuning what it creates.
- Use Tools Like ChatGPT At Work & During a Job Search with Caution: For one thing, ChatGPT can and will give you incorrect information, with confidence. The technical term for this is “artificial hallucination,” and it got an attorney who used ChatGPT for research in trouble for citing cases that never existed in court. As David says, “I struggle with the stuff that you look at that’s been pushed out there, Chat GPT-4, and the fact that it’s still kicking out errors,” says David. It’s important to note that ChatGPT is just in a beta phase. Tools like this are only as good as the data they are fed. And in ChatGPT’s case, that data comes from the internet which is not always the most reliable source.
- Follow Company Guidelines and Laws: If you’re going to strike out on your own and leverage these new tools at work, it’s important to also check with your company about any policies. ChatGPT is not secure, so be careful before you give ChatGPT access to confidential company information or customer data. The FTC stated that businesses are responsible for ensuring AI is used without endangering consumer protections. However, some states are considering new laws to regulate the use of these tools.
- Be Aware of Ethical Implications: Using AI comes with a larger social responsibility. Many platforms have demonstrated serious bias against protected classes. Additionally, they have been trained on works created by artists who gave no consent (and received no credit or payment for their works). That’s to say nothing of the ability of AI to create audio and video that sounds or looks exactly like you.
New advancements in AI are in their early days so it’s hard to predict their full impact. But that doesn’t mean you can’t cautiously use new tools during a job search or at work. At the end of the day, AI won’t necessarily replace jobs, but it could change the fundamental nature of them. Get ahead of it by being familiar with how it works, how it could affect your job and what you can do to take advantage of these new technologies.
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