If the last five to seven years of tech innovation will come to be known as the period of advances in social media and wireless connectivity (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat, and others), I believe the next period will be known for something much more meaningful. Many are calling the Internet of Things as the next significant wave in tech, but I believe that Artificial Intelligence (or “AI”) will play a bigger part in what’s to come and will usher in a fundamental shift that has the potential to cause the greatest positive disruption and impact to the lives of regular people.
What will be the ultimate impact and what can we expect?
A more productive workforce where everything but the most essential of functions will be outsourced to automated platforms who will be able to complete tasks with similar (or better) efficiency and at a fraction of the cost of low to medium skilled workers.
What types of employees will be most effected by this change?
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but here’s a few functions which stand to be eliminated or significantly reduced; secretaries, taxi cab/limousine drivers, call in center/switchboard operators, factory/assembly line workers, and may even extend to educators. Again, there are probably another 1000 roles which are similar to these which I did not include.
At TechU Angels we have already invested in a company which we expect will play a significant role in this new era. At this stage, it is in stealth mode and we have agreed not to disclose it, but we hope to and will with time. We continue to look for opportunities in the AI space, and I believe will roll the dice when we find an opportunity which fits our criteria.
One such company that is actively playing a role in this space is x.ai which publicly launched several months ago and garnered much attention (note: We are not investors). I have been using this platform to book meetings and their automated secretary Amy Ingram has personally saved me a lot of time in handling a function which needs to be done, takes a lot of time, and which doesn’t require much skill. In my opinion, she has also done a job on par with, or better than any physical person that I could have hired for the role.
Over time, I expect this platform to expand into more difficult tasks, like booking restaurants, arranging work related travel, paying my bills, and more typical secretarial functions like picking up phone calls, having a conversation with the initiator, and routing (or taking a message when appropriate) a call to the appropriate channel. If you haven’t checked out them out yet, I recommend you do, and definitely sign up and take their platform for a test-drive.
In the long run (maybe 5 years or less even), you will likely see platforms like x.ai cutting into the number of secretaries in the workforce, Google self driving cars replacing cab drivers, and natural language processing platforms removing (or significantly reducing) call service operators from the workforce. Best of all, you’ll be able to accomplish all of this at a fraction of the cost, at a higher satisfaction rate over time, and potentially with much less grief and attitude.
We can expect the long term impact to be pretty significant and to create a significant gap between the have’s and have not’s, and ultimately those with higher education and skills will have a more acute, apparent advantage than those who don’t.
It will be interesting to see how this unfold over the next few years.