How businesses should be readying themselves for the AI revolution

AI is all set to shake up how businesses do their thing, but businesses aren’t quite ready for the AI revolution. Cisco’s AI Readiness Index for 2023 shows that just 14% of businesses worldwide are ready to take advantage of and roll out artificial intelligence. European companies, in particular, are finding it tough to train their employees on how to use AI and to come up with a solid plan for using AI responsibly.

“At the moment, businesses aren’t well-equipped to deal with AI,” David Shrier told TNW. “It’s not going as fast as it should.”

Shrier is a futurist and heads up the venture studio Visionary Futures LLC, which helps companies grow and invests in startups. He’s also a Professor of Practice at Imperial College London and a Visiting Scholar at the GEAR Lab in the School of Engineering at MIT.

When it comes to matching AI dreams with reality, Shrier has three pieces of advice: “Build new skills, put processes in place so that you can do it at scale, and change your corporate governance.” But what does this really mean?

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Need for new processes around artificial intelligence

“So first of all, you need to build expertise around artificial intelligence, so that CEOs, boards of directors, and employees know what it can and what it can’t do,” Shrier says.

Another big thing to think about is where your company’s data is going when you use AI tools, and then how to keep it safe and stop leaks and cyber attacks. It’s a big deal, with workers saying they’ve used AI without their boss knowing, and even giving tools like ChatGPT confidential information.

Once you’ve set these goals, it’s really important to check your algorithms regularly. You also need to put rules in place. This means having an AI committee led by an AI Officer – a new top-level job that would report to the CEO and give advice to the board.

Time to upgrade workforce skills

Companies should also spend money on their workers and help them get ready for AI. Make sure your people know about AI, Shrier suggests.

In particular, workers need to be able to learn new things every three to six months – this is called “flash growth.” The new skills should also be about what humans are better at than AI. This means things like being creative, understanding emotions, getting along with people, and working in teams.

“So if AI replaces a lot of analytics and process functions, humans still have a role to play because they’re good at these other things,” he explains.

Leveraging the potential of AI

Once you’ve got these systems set up, you can really get the most out of what AI can do. “You can make your people at least 10 times if not 100 times more productive and your business 10 times, 100 times larger,” Shrier notes.

One way to do that is by using AI to gather up all the smart ideas from everyone. This means mixing together the right amount of expert guesses and the ideas of lots of people, with the help of computer programs.

Another option is to make a “corporate GPT,” an AI that’s made just for your company’s data, ways of doing things, and how you work. Then you can teach your workers how to use it. “This way you have these enhanced humans that are working with your corporate knowledge to do things 10 times better,” Shrier says.

Shrier thinks that with this new tech, we can really make people work better in a big way.

“In an ideal AI future we are unlocking greater human potential. And we’re achieving more and building a utopian society,” he explains. “Imagine if we had a 20-hour work week or a 15-hour work week. And people had more time to spend on leisure and with their families, and yet, we had greater economic prosperity. And everyone was fed and had clean water and housing.”

Shrier’s biggest worry is whether the good stuff from AI will go to five or 7.5 billion people – and that’s what will decide how much good the tech will do for everyone.

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Is AI doomsday real?

A new survey, asking 2,778 researchers, found that many think there’s a scary possibility that artificial intelligence might wipe out humanity. Just over half of the AI experts asked think there’s a 5% chance of humans being wiped out, along with other “really bad stuff.”

On average, the people in the survey guessed there’s a 10% chance that machines will be better than humans at everything by 2027. They also thought there’s a 50% chance of this happening by 2047. But it’s not all doom and gloom: 68.3% of those asked think that “good things from super-smart AI” are more likely than bad ones. Most importantly, the survey shows that researchers don’t agree on whether we should speed up or slow down AI development. There are a lot of different opinions on this. The five percent statistic, however, speaks volumes, indicating a noteworthy perceived threat.

“It’s an important signal that most AI researchers don’t find it strongly implausible that advanced AI destroys humanity,” author Katja Grace at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in California, told New Scientist. “I think this general belief in a non-minuscule risk is much more telling than the exact percentage risk.”

As the survey notes, “forecasting is difficult in general, and subject-matter experts have been observed to perform poorly. Our participants’ expertise is in AI, and they do not, to our knowledge, have any unusual skill at forecasting in general.”

But that doesn’t imply their opinion should be dismissed.

“While unreliable, educated guesses are what we must all rely on, and theirs are informed by expertise in the relevant field,” the researchers write. “These forecasts should be part of a broader set of evidence from sources such as trends in computer hardware, advancements in AI capabilities, economic analyses, and insights from forecasting experts.”