Bergur Thormundsson
Research expert covering technology in the Nordics, AI and smart cities
Get in touch with us nowReskilling in the age of AI
AI has become a growing concern across industries. Even if we consider its ability to assist with simple, boring, and repetitive tasks, it will inevitably change the way we train our workforce and navigate traditional career paths. Most expect that AI adoption will lead to at least 20 percent or more of enterprise employees needing to be reskilled. This is a significant level of reskilling, as reorienting one in five employees will take time, money, and effort. Of the many positions potentially automated, data management will likely be the most intensively affected. Generative AI will likely make 90 percent of data processing positions automatable, and some 80 percent of data collection positions. These positions include human resources, office support workers, and other manual but simple office work.The United States expects big gains
Both in productivity and labor changes, the U.S. is likely to be heavily impacted by the adoption of AI. This impact need not be purely negative. Labor rotation, if handled correctly, can swiftly move workers to more productive and value-added industries rather than simple manual labor ones. In turn, these industry shifts will lead to a more productive economy. AI could boost U.S. labor productivity growth by 1.5 percentage points over a 10-year period. This, of course, depends on a variety of factors, such as how powerful the next generation of AI is, the difficulty of tasks it will be able to perform, and the number of workers displaced. The most heavily influenced of the many professions in the U.S. would be the education sector, which is expected to be automated nearly three times more with the use of AI than without. How the world decides to tackle the inevitable AI adaptation will dictate the winners and losers of the world’s economic competition.
