Does AI really have the ability to replace human jobs?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is growing across industries around the world and as its growth pace quickens people across the globe worry that it will soon replace human jobs.

Using AI can give a helping hand to most sectors, from healthcare to banking, by quickening the rate of data processing and administrative work. It can also work to treat patients and deal with customers.

Research by Capgemini revealed that 83% of organisations introducing AI have found the technology is in fact helping to create new roles within the company, rather than take them away, with two out of three new jobs being at manager level or higher. In addition, from those surveyed just under three quarters said no jobs in their workplace had been replaced by using AI robots at all.

In comparison, research carried out by Merck found quite the opposite as 23% of respondents believe that AI is a threat to the security of their jobs, taking over roles such as administrative and data processing.

Though just under a quarter of Merck respondents feel threatened, such jobs have had time reduced drastically with the use of AI allowing workers to deliver higher value jobs to a better quality standard as a result, according to Capgemini.

Michael Natusch, Global Head of AI at Prudential, said: “AI is taking away the time humans previously spent on repetitive issues and allowing them to focus on where human intelligence can drive value – for both themselves and for customers.”

The use of artificial intelligence has been encouraged across many data heavy, analytical sectors such as the healthcare because it has been proven that the accuracy levels of robotic AI systems are higher than those of a human.

Both findings seem to agree that artificial intelligence can improve the accuracy of data analytics and diagnoses; Merck’s research found a third of Brits believe AI could improve accuracy of medical diagnosis, alongside Capgemini’s research that revealed 89% believe that AI will make complex analytic jobs much easier than a human would find it.

Although the job of AI is effectively to produce the

most accurate conclusion to solve a problem, just under half (45%) don’t think that robots will replace curious thinking jobs in the nursing industry. A seemingly concerning area for Merck respondents was the lack of compassion AI devices hold generally, but specifically across the medical field.

The majority (77%) of respondents agreed that there isn’t an AI alternative for compassion to patients, suggesting that AI won’t be a success if implemented across healthcare trusts. However, Softbank Robotics created Pepper Robot with emotional AI developments, designed to comfort people when it senses sadness or vice versa.

Pepper Robot is an AI Robot that uses facial recognition to detect a patient’s emotions, whether they are happy or said and uses voice recognition to hear concern from a human.

Robots and AI might seem to be ‘taking over’ but in reality they’re just enhancing the jobs that humans can do just as well by helping them to be done quicker so humans can better their own jobs. By doing so, it could increase company, individual and customer satisfaction which is evident in Capgemini’s results which found that almost three quarters (73%) of respondents believe AI can improve customer satisfaction.