AI may not replace you, but someone who uses it can — here’s the No. 1 skill you need to stay relevant
The most successful companies and employees of today are figuring out how to use AI to their advantage in order to remain relevant and competitive.
“AI won’t take your place. At a panel discussion at Salesforce’s World Tour Essentials event in Singapore, Laurence Liew, director for AI Innovation at AI Singapore, stated, “You’re going to be replaced by someone who uses AI to outperform you.”
According to the 2024 Work Trend Index by Microsoft and LinkedIn, while many professionals (45%) fear AI will replace their jobs, the majority of leaders (55%) are worried about a shortage of people to fill roles.
71% [of leaders] say they’d rather hire a less experienced candidate with AI skills than a more experienced candidate without them.
2024 Microsoft Work Trends Index
Since there is a shortage of talent, there is a great opportunity for those who can pick up AI skills. According to the survey, 71% of business leaders said they would rather hire a less experienced candidate with AI skills than one with more experience without them.
Despite the fact that artificial intelligence (AI) has been the talk of the town since OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched in November 2022, many corporations have been sluggish to adopt the technology and help upskill their talent pools.
In the modern workplace, there is a difference between what is necessary and what seems doable.
According to a Microsoft report, while 79% of executives think their organization needs to implement AI to be competitive, the drive to produce quick returns on investment has hindered the adoption of AI.
Because of this, workers everywhere are taking matters into their own hands and becoming independent users of AI products. Developing your AI skills at home can provide you a competitive advantage, but there are drawbacks as well.
The risks of self-learning AI
Experts claim that a major obstacle to upskilling on AI at home is the lack of knowledge among many individuals on safe and efficient methods.
Although ChatGPT and other tools utilizing large language models (LLMs) appear to be many “free” AI resources online, experts claim that these tools aren’t truly free. Large-scale datasets are used by LLM algorithms to detect, summarize, translate, forecast, and produce information.
Nothing in this world is free. “The commodity you are trading is your data,” Liew stated. “When using free online AI tools, you should not be using any of your personal or company data.”
By doing this, private or business information may be compromised. Learning how to use AI tools safely and successfully is a necessary part of upskilling.
The must-have AI skill
Effective communication with current AI-powered LLMs is the most important talent to acquire nowadays, according to Liew. LLMs are used by Open AI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, and Google’s Gemini.
You have to give the AI a lot of context — treat AI like a very hardworking intern that will make mistakes occasionally.
Laurence Liew DIRECTOR FOR AI INNOVATION AT AI SINGAPORE
“People use ChatGPT wrongly — because it looks exactly like Google search,” Liew told CNBC Make It.
The secret to dealing with an LLM is to give precise instructions.
The AI must be given a great deal of context; think of it as a diligent intern who occasionally makes mistakes. If you stop to think about it, an intern will not be asked to do a task in a single sentence. He stated that the intern would most likely be baffled about what to do.
Using AI tools at home is the best method to advance your skills with them, advises Liew. You may teach the LLM to produce the desired result by practicing feeding it with more detailed directions.
Imagine when you can turn around [work] at that sort of speed — the kind of transformation that can occur. “You still need to know [your domain] very well [but] the mundane part of looking through 20 files is now done by the AI system,” Liew said.
By the next year, Liew predicted, “it will be like knowing how to use your spell-checker in Microsoft Word,” despite the fact that AI tools may still appear unfamiliar.
