It's been more than a year since the public first gained access to OpenAI's ChatGPT, giving various industries the opportunity to experiment with artificial intelligence (AI) and a glimpse of the transformative potential, or lack thereof.
“Any industry that has large amounts of data that needs to be indexed and processed quickly is ripe for AI integration,” Reema Khan, founder and CEO of Green Sands Equity, told Fox News Digital. “In technology, for example, writing thousands of lines of code is much easier to do with an AI co-pilot and can increase the productivity of a software engineer tenfold.”
The US economy added more than 353,000 jobs in January 2024, but the technology sector continues to suffer significant layoffs. Google laid off several hundred employees from its sales and advertising teams in the same month as part of multiple rounds of cost-cutting measures.
Job security remains a primary concern with the long-term adoption of AI across industries. Many worry and wonder if their industry will be the next to see AI integrated and their position made redundant. AI, in some form, has been in continuous development for more than half a decade, meaning that last year provided the broadest application and understanding of a technology that many have already tried in some form in recent years.
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Black Friday Shopping in Soho (Thomas Iannaccone/WWD/Penske Media via Getty Images)
“Customer service across multiple industries has rapidly shifted toward AI,” said Dev Nag, founder and CEO of AI-powered assistant QueryPal, as an example. “For example, Klarna recently claimed that its AI assistant was able to cover the work of 700 laid-off employees, handling “two-thirds” of customer chats, or 2.3 million conversations, so far.”
An analysis by consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found that most industries have seen at least one attempt to use artificial intelligence technology. Perhaps not surprisingly, technology, media and telecommunications companies are the most likely to regularly integrate for work and use outside of work.
Energy and materials companies have shown the greatest resistance to regular adoption, while consumer goods and retail have shown the fewest attempts, even single-use, to integrate AI. And that trend is unlikely to change, according to Khan.
“Currently, AI is great for assisting with computational or memory tasks, but anything that requires human-to-human interaction or intuition is still a domain of expertise for non-AI jobs,” Khan said. “We believe this trend will become even more entrenched as humans will differentiate themselves in these tasks compared to AI.”
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Nag agreed that industries most reliant on “high-trust personal relationships, as well as those covered by stricter regulations or distribution gatekeepers” have shown greater resistance to AI adoption and will likely continue that resistance to change. .
“AI has perhaps had the greatest effect in consumer applications, where voice assistants are as common as watches (whether Amazon Echo or mobile voice assistants), spam filters continue to improve, and facial recognition ( for online photos and real-world cameras) has pushed far beyond what traditional computer vision algorithms could hope to achieve,” he added.
YouTube Music outsourced workers employed by Alphabet's outsourced partner Cognizant strike outside Google's office in Austin, Texas, on February 3, 2023. (Suzanne Cordeiro/AFP via Getty Images)
However, AI thought leader and technology investor Ed Watal remained optimistic about the overall adoption of AI across industries, arguing that management and C-level staff in organizations have shown greater awareness of “the potential benefits and risks of not being an early adopter” of new technologies. technologies.
“Industries that have a lot of manual functions that are primarily service-oriented and require remote and distributed workforces,” Watal told Fox News Digital. He cited industries such as home maintenance and construction as industries that will show greater resistance to early adoption of AI.
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“The more inconsistent the business processes within an industry, the more difficult it will be to incorporate AI. For example, supply chains where suppliers do not change very frequently will likely be able to integrate AI into their processes,” he said.
“On the one hand, AI is being applied to automatically screen resumes and screen candidates, while on the other hand, people are using AI to create resumes that better fit the requirements,” Watal explained. “Both of these things have raised questions about bias and equity in hiring and ethics in resume writing.”
Visitors and attendees during an AI-created worship service. (Daniel Vogl/Picture Alliance via Getty Images)
Watal suggested that those who want to explore the possibilities that AI could offer within their industry should follow a “simple three-step approach” to gain awareness: learn the basic concepts and terms about AI, start learning about AI tools for personal productivity and learning the main use. cases of AI within a given industry.
Watal also noted that while significant job layoffs in some industries may cause concern, it remains difficult to quantify whether job losses have occurred as a result of AI adoption, as “there is an overall decline in the number of people employed year after year”. year from 2021.”
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However, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has shown that the industries most affected by job losses are in the labor-intensive sectors of mining and logging in February 2024. Education services and health have seen the largest increase in jobs.
