Thursday, January 11, 2018

Dear MBAs, AI is Coming For You: The Coming Wave of Expert Automation & Augmentation Software (EAAS)

From CB Insights, Jan. 4:
White collar workers — including lawyers, consultants, financial advisors, journalists, traders, and more — will all face the effects of AI.

When artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on jobs and the economy comes up, the conversation centers on blue collar jobs. Per The State of Automation Report, there are 4.6M such jobs at risk in the USA due to AI.

But, the jobs of MBAs and their white-collar brethren will also be impacted dramatically by AI.
A growing wave of AI-infused Expert Automation & Augmentation Software (EAAS, pronounced /ēz/) platforms will usher in a new era of AI-assisted or AI-enhanced productivity.
This AI-enhanced productivity is threatening jobs at the lower end of the white-collar spectrum as evidenced by these recent headlines.
But to start, Expert Automation & Augmentation Software will be more focused on augmentation, i.e., helping humans do countless complex tasks that are either beyond human cognition and/or inefficient for human beings to do (read thousands of pages of patents and understand key topics).
Think of these AI-enhanced assistants as junior analysts (lawyers, journalists, etc) who never tire and who can process information beyond human capacity but who will still need the steady eye of a manager to make subjective judgments.
But as with many things in technology, change comes gradually and then suddenly. So while the applications of EAAs platforms may be at the lower-end today, they will get more sophisticated with time.

Below is a detailed breakdown of the many industries and jobs that Expert Automation & Augmentation Software platforms are changing ranging from finance to journalists to HR managers. With white collar jobs across an array of industries at risk, we wanted to understand how machine intelligence is being used to augment and automate what these professionals do to understand the broader EAAS landscape....MUCH MORE