People and Machines: Partners in Innovation

Thoughtful adoption of intelligent technologies will be essential to survival for many companies. But simply implementing the newest technologies and automation tools won’t be enough. Success will depend on whether organizations use them to innovate in their operations and in their products and services — and whether they acquire and develop the human capital to do so.

In a recent Deloitte survey of 250 executives familiar with how their companies are thinking about intelligent technologies, nearly three out of four said that they expected AI to substantially transform their organizations within three years.1 Of course, the workforce will be deeply affected by all this change. Yet even as AI eliminates some jobs in the coming decade (it most certainly will), it may create as many positions as it kills and open up vast new opportunities for collaborations between humans and machines. Earlier talk of large-scale job loss2 has subsided somewhat. In the Deloitte survey, for example, reducing head count through automation was the lowest-ranked objective for AI — only 7% of the respondents selected that as their first priority. Indeed, many observers are shifting their expectations away from job loss to job change, as humans find ways to work closely with machines.

Given the likelihood that many jobs will change rather than disappear, organizations need to understand the new skills required. In a recent McKinsey survey of executives at companies with revenues of more than $100 million, 66% of respondents said “addressing potential skills gaps related to automation/digitization” within their workforce was a “top 10 priority”; 64% of the U.S. respondents and 70% of the European respondents said they needed to retrain or replace at least a quarter of their current workforce.3 Significantly, just 16% of the business leaders responded that they were “very prepared” to address potential skills gaps, raising serious questions about their readiness to compete. Other recent surveys suggest that the high expectations executives have for intelligent technologies exceed their skills and experience in integrating such technologies into their companies.4

Although we have observed and worked with many large companies and startups on AI issues, we know of very few that have begun significant job redesign, re-skilling, or retraining programs. Moreover, most individuals aren’t being adequately re-skilled or retrained for automation-enabled work.