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Employers want their employees to know how to use artificial intelligence.
Since ChatGPT took the web by storm last year, the pervasiveness of AI has ballooned as a pop culture fascination and a powerful workplace tool. Financial markets, too, have taken notice, with mentions of AI on earnings calls surging 366% from this year's first quarter to the second quarter, according to a study by WallStreetZen.
Karin Kimbrough, chief economist of LinkedIn, said at a fireside chat on Monday that there's not a lot of job talent who are considered AI proficient.
"It's not that employers want everyone to become an AI expert," Kimbrough said at the event. "They just want people to become AI literate."
Kimbrough told Insider in an interview that AI literacy means "the ability to make use of tools to help you do your job better."
That could mean "shedding some of the routine tasks that prevent you from doing more interesting work," she said, or it could mean using generative AI to help with summarizing information. It could also mean understanding when human judgment should come into play, she said.
Masayoshi Son, the chief executive of SoftBank, said this week companies must lean into the technology or risk getting left behind.
To that point, Sinclair Schuller, the co-founder of Nuvalence, a consulting firm that uses generative AI, said the nascent technology is on the fast-track to widespread adoption in the workplace. Hiring managers and bosses across sectors, he told Insider, are going to soon expect employees to embrace it.
"The bottom line is that having an AI-centric mindset — by considering AI as a collaborator, and hiring and upskilling accordingly — is the key to getting the most value out of these tools," Schuller said.
But even as employers rush to adopt AI tool, there are deep concerns over the impact AI might ultimately have on society. An analysis from Pew Research Center said 52% of US adults are feeling "more concerned than excited about the increased use of artificial intelligence" based on a survey done this past summer.
A 2022 survey from Pew shows mixed results from US workers on whether they think AI will help or hurt them in the workplace over the next 20 years.
"I think the biggest shift for I think people in thinking about the impact on jobs of generative AI compared to all of the other AI that exists is that it is primarily people who thought their jobs were safer from AI that are more anxious today than ever before," Chris Hyams, chief executive officer of Indeed, told Insider.
Over the last year, the labor market has remained surprisingly resilient amid the Federal Reserve's interest rate hikes. Unemployment held steady at 3.8% in September, and there were still about 1.5 job openings per unemployed person as of August.
Hyams said the jobs where face-to-face interaction isn't needed or where a worker doesn't have to engage in much physical activity, for instance, are the ones where artificial intelligence and especially generative AI are "capable of doing a larger part of the job that you're doing right now."
He clarified that this doesn't mean these jobs are necessarily more likely to vanish, but they could be susceptible to big changes.
"Imagine having unlimited, on-demand access to nearly infinite business knowledge," Schuller added. "Your team could use it to do anything from automating mundane tasks to streamlining processes, even developing new, intelligent insights. Used in the right way, AI could enable a 500-person company to achieve the output of 1000 employees."
