It is said that AI will do to white-collar workers what the industrial revolution did to the artisans and craftsmen of the 18th and 19th centuries — put many of them out of a job, for a start. The new technological intervention promises higher speed, productivity, convenience and efficiency compared to that offered by humans. Although the jury is still out on whether it can replace the most creative and sophisticated of human labor, it looks certain that it will drastically improve efficiency in most of the current, white-collar jobs.
TNIE looks at five such functions where the amount of human labor required is likely to be dramatically reduced in coming years..
Sales
Generative AI tools have the potential to boost sales to the next level. They can go beyond simply assessing consumer behavior by scouring through social media, industry research, product pages and customer reviews. Generative AI has the potential to combine huge amounts of customer data — including demographic information, market trends and consumer behavior to make customer segments. These segments can then be targeted through personalized outreach to generate high quality leads. AI tools can make sure that each consumer is treated according to his taste and interests. This has the potential to enhance sales and create a revolution in the market.
Marketing
Marketing is another area where AI tools can come handy. AI has the potential to take over the advertising industry as it can provide high quality content for social media marketing, brand advertising and marketing of products. In fact, advertising and marketing has been one of the earliest adopters of AI, particularly on platforms such as Google Ads and social media. Now, generative AI tools such as Midjourney, DALL-E can help with visual content generation for advertising. It can also help with enhancing the search engine optimisation and thereby lower the cost of marketing. In a diverse country like India, AI tools can help with localizing the advertisements to cater to the taste of different consumers, which would otherwise need a lot of effort.
Customer Support
AI tools can increase the efficiency of customer support services by providing quick responses to customer queries. This too has been one of the earliest areas where AI has already created a massive disruption, and led to a decline in jobs. AI chat boxes are being used as an initial support system before getting to the customer executive as most of the customer queries are standard and could be resolved without complexities. The customer executives could make use of AI tools in resolving issues. This can make services more effective and quick. AI tools also have the potential to replace the customer executives by resolving complex problems and providing human-like responses.
Software Engineering
Generative AI can be used by engineers to boost productivity by automating code writing, predicting and pre-empting problems while also being able to rapidly convert programming languages. Although it has not been an early adopter, this is an area where tremendous progress is being made on a daily basis. Software engineers can iterate on potential system design configurations and then get assistance from AI tools in generating drafts, finding prompts and navigating the database. The AI tools can also increase efficiency by testing the code for bugs by iterating self generated test cases. GitHub Copilot and Replit by Microsoft are already being used widely by software developers for pair programming.
Research and Development
Deep learning AI tools can help product designers to iterate designs and ideate more options as it can help with virtual stimulation. It can also help optimize test cases for efficient testing. Foundation models of AI are being used to generate molecules for chemicals and biotech companies and in the future have the potential to be used to design larger physical products. This has the potential to not only shave years off development timelines, but also lead to massive savings and the generation of drugs and other products with never-before-seen features.