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As a business consultant and long-time executive, I often get questions about the potential impact of AI (artificial intelligence) on team member careers and their businesses. My answer is that AI is just one of many challenges that are facing every business these days, and another reason for constantly upgrading your skills and your strategy for managing your career and your business.
Obviously, your goal should be to always add real value to your role, but I’m always looking for more specifics in this regard. I found some excellent insights in a new book, “IRREPLACEABLE: The Art of Standing Out in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” by Pascal Bornet. Pascal is an award-winning author and speaker on the impact of AI and automation on business professionals.
I especially enjoyed his seven symbiosis principles and specific recommendations for preparing now for the impact of AI currently and in the future. We can all learn from these principles, which I will summarize and paraphrase here:
1. Develop and nurture complementary capabilities. Create synergy with AI by highlighting your creative thinking and emotional intelligence to complement the immense computational power, memory, and precision of artificial intelligence. This symbiosis allows you to lead advancements and efficiencies in your business and your career.
2. Seek to understand AI capabilities and limitations. By knowing what artificial intelligence can and cannot do, you can better direct oversight efforts and foster effective and ethical AI applications in your business. This will allow you to stay a step ahead of peers and competitors, and provide much needed leadership in a rapidly changing world.
3. Work toward common goals and aligned values. For example, better customer service requires a dual commitment to quick and precise answers, as well as a sensitivity to emotionally charged customer situations and initiatives that align with you higher level purpose. Identify areas that AI can support human workers without replacing them.
4. Leverage AI benefits while emphasizing human skills. As in symbiosis, where organisms are interdependent but not overly reliant on each other, you need to find ways to work independently of AI while still collaborating. This means leveraging AI’s benefits while keeping essential human skills, including empathy and judgement, in play.
5. Be flexible and adapt to changes driven by AI. As AI technologies evolve, so must your strategies for interacting and guiding these systems interacting with your business and career. You must adopt a continuous learning approach, adapting your skills and methods to enhance AI’s evolving capabilities, with a focus on developing resilience.
6. Recognize where AI has supremacy in scalability and speed. Don’t try to compete where AI has an obvious advantage. Rather, elevate your skills where humans will always have the advantage, including creativity and emotional intelligence. Currently the relevant realm of AI is calculation, text summarization, code generation, and automation.
7. Highlight your human uniqueness in life experiences. Use your human capabilities, deeply rooted in personal history, critical thinking, and social authenticity, which AI cannot replicate, to reach beyond and add value to your business and customer set. By focusing on these abilities, you will create a synergy that will make your human role irreplaceable.
All of these principles support his view and mine that AI is here to stay, and the impact will be generally positive, subject to necessary controls and management, just like every other new technology that we are continually dealing with. There is no reason to assume that it will take over your business or your career, if you are willing and able to adapt to the changes implied.
For both you and your business, it simply means more focus on the long-existing imperative to stay irreplaceable. I urge you to take it as an opportunity rather than a problem to overcome. Just remember that becoming irreplaceable requires collaboration, partnership, and a shared commitment for shaping the future to benefit all. It’s time to get started today.
Related: How Startups Can Compete with Tech Giants: 6 Proven Strategies