How employers can guide knowledge workers through the AI shift

IN THE boardroom, we call it risk management. In HR, resilience. In marketing, futureproofing. What we all really want is accurate predictions on when what is going to change, and solutions on how to delay - or ideally, prevent - the impact of those predictions.

- JUANITA VORSTER

When the advice to quell this fear-fuelled need for predictions is “you can’t prevent it, you have to adapt to it’, we however refuse to accept it.

Instead, we lay the responsibility for adaptation at someone else’s feet, or we launch initiatives to figure out how to be the one company that withstands the storm and remain “resilient” while others experience ruin.

Or we create and try to enforce preventative rules that simply result in busy work we can use to make ourselves feel more in control. All this is merely masking our ongoing search for an answer that will better align with how we thought/ hoped/planned things would be in our future.

To effectively respond to looming change (with the added threat of mass layoffs due to advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI)), knowledge workers - and their employers - don’t need more predictions on what exactly will happen over the next two years as AI wrecks well-laid plans like coffee spilled over last-minute homework. They (we) need to buckle down and get to work. Different work.

Refocus training and development