• Swami Sivasubramanian is the VP of AI and Data at Amazon Web Services.
• He shares how while AI may cause short-term job displacement, it offers long-term productivity gains.
• He suggests that workers use AI to take over mundane tasks so they can do more valuable work.

The era of generative AI has arrived, bringing both promise and caution. Many people are wondering if AI can coexist peacefully and productively alongside a broad human workforce with diverse talents, skills, and abilities.

I believe that AI isn't coming to take away jobs — it's coming to take away tasks. 80% of employees' time is consumed by low-value, repetitive, time-intensive, uninteresting tasks, while only 20% gets devoted to the more interesting activities that generate higher value for the organization.

What if we could flip that ratio? What if we could free humans to solve, build, and create? That's what I believe AI can do. In the process, this new AI paradigm can unlock the value of an accelerated and more fulfilling career. I strongly believe that what we invent today can lead to a profound impact on the world — changing industries and people's lives.

Marie Kondo-ing with AI

Thoughtfully deployed, generative AI can remove drudgery and help people find more meaning in their work. It can free you to work on the parts of your job that are more interesting and more valuable — the reasons you got into your profession in the first place.

I think the Marie Kondo principle applies: If the task doesn't spark joy, let AI take it from you. Our goal must be to kindle (or rekindle) our joy, to bring out curiosity and creativity, and to reimagine what's possible, now that we're no longer burdened with an assortment of mundane tasks. In a sense, AI can give each of us a job promotion, not be a job replacement.

There will be short-term displacement but it will self-correct

Of course, the widescale adoption of Gen AI will have impacts and implications, and it would be foolhardy to ignore them. Increased productivity and greater cost efficiencies will inevitably lead to short-term workforce displacement — for example, contact centers with faster resolution times need fewer workers.

However, I believe that AI will also play a self-correcting role in such a macroeconomic picture. Efforts must be made to close wage disparities and potential economic or opportunity gaps. Community colleges should offer guided and hands-on training to ensure AI is accessible to the broadest areas of our workforce. Similarly, technology companies must offer low-cost or free training and certification programs to promote AI's widespread adoption and use.

I believe AI can cut the time for this upskilling process in half and foresee a world where nearly anyone can be an app builder and creator or where a junior technician can do senior-level repairs.

Decisions should still be made by humans

Whether it's conversational search, agent assistants, image creation, or other forms of intelligent automation, AI becomes a supportive foundation that translates into time — time to evaluate, investigate, strategize — and solves problems.

AI will give us access to a nearly limitless set of highly accurate, data-driven predictions. Nonetheless, decisions shouldn't be automated. They should remain the sole province of humans, who have a better understanding of tradeoffs, nuances, and strategies.

Here are some examples of how humans can work alongside AI:

• Customer Care: Gen AI can provide agents with personalized, real-time responses and prompts based on customer questions and interactions. Agents then exercise their judgment to use them.
• Manufacturing Design: Engineers can use AI to create digital twins to simulate interactions and their effects with far greater speed and far less expense before they decide on a design.
• Consumer Behavior: Gen AI can predict the preferences and responses of groups or individual buyers. This will allow marketers to focus on how to optimize campaigns and offers.
• Drug Discovery: With Gen AI, scientists can slash the time required for drug discovery, accelerate therapy development, and find vaccines that are cheaper and more accessible.
• Media: By automating the difficult art and production aspects of games and entertainment, Gen AI frees designers to create and ideate more. It can even create personalized gaming experiences.
• Financial Services: Gen AI can strengthen fraud detection and compliance while increasing the efficiency of loan officers making lending decisions.

By being able to focus on decisions and outcomes, we unlock new creativity that we can channel to solving bigger and harder problems. With this new era of generative AI discovery, there has never been a better time to transform businesses and work as we know it.

Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian is the Vice President of AI & Data at AWS. His team's mission is to help organizations leverage the power of AI and data to solve their most urgent business needs.

If you're an AI expert and would like to share your opinions on the impact of AI on the future of work, email Jane Zhang at [email protected].