Automation, artificial intelligence and the future of work

Robotics, AI and project-based labour will radically change the way we work.

Digital technologies have given Australian workers unprecedented options for where and how they work. But Australia’s future workforce won’t just be more mobile – it may not even resemble a traditional workforce at all.

In today’s hyper-competitive world, scarcity of specific skill sets and the realisation of the resultant economic impact of labour shortages is leading employers to consider new hiring models and technologies to meet their needs.

The Melbourne-based digital marketplace provider Envato employs approximately 250 workers, many with highly sought-after skills in programming, digital design, and data analytics.

Envato’s human resources director James Law says the fast-changing nature of his industry makes it difficult to foresee what skills his future workforce will need. Hence Envato will hire based on core knowledge of topics such as understanding data and designing user-centric processes, and train them on the details as required.

“We need to look at hiring in people who don’t have the requisite skills to fulfil the role now, but who we can teach those skills to fulfil it in the future,” Law says.

The company has also begun broadening its thinking around where it recruits from.

“We know there are places in the world that have deep pools of talent around certain skill sets, so we need to access recruitment agents in other countries,” Law says. “It is about opening up more channels to allow more skills, and then doing some growth internally.”

For some employers however, the need to get the right skills quickly is leading them to reconsider the actual definition of an employee, and consider a contingent labour force.

This model has underpinned sectors such as the film industry for decades, where specialists move from project to project based on the strength of their reputations.

But according to the vice president of marketing and communications at the Australian contingent labour marketplace Nvoi, Adrian Wicks, the model is spreading among a wider group of employers.

Wicks says up to 25 per cent of the global labour force is now contingent, and expects figure will double by 2020. In Australia he says the trend is more modest, but will grow from 11 per cent of the workforce now to 25 percent by 2020.

Wicks says the change is enabled by better technology getting into the hands of workers, and a greater understanding that many workers are preferring to manage their own work lives.

More importantly however, Wicks says employers are coming to realise traditional hiring methods are simply too slow for the current pace of business, with projects vacancies costing up to $30,000.

“A company is going to live or die by the speed at which they can urgently bring on skilled professionals,” Wicks says. “For a manager who needs to have all of their vacancies filled to keep their project going, having those skilled professionals on demand is really going to save the project.

“So businesses will have a core central group of people who are mission-critical, and then they will be using skilled professionals on assignment-based work in and around that.”

But another factor could have an even more significant impact on the composition of the future workforce. Artificial intelligence is beginning to demonstrate its value in automating both tedious and highly-complex tasks – many of which were previously performed by humans.

According to Professor Toby Walsh, an expert in AI and research group leader at CSIRO’s Data61 group, a range of jobs from taxi drivers to legal interns are under threat from automation – right up to highly-skilled skilled jobs such as radiographers.

“There is some promising research showing that you can read radiographs more reliably and quicker with a computer than you can with a human,” Walsh says. “So a job that used to require years of training to have the specialist skill to be able to read radiographs is a job that we are going to automate quite quickly.”

For some workers, Walsh says AI-based automation will provide relief from many of the more tedious tasks they face.

“A lot more science is done today because we have computers that collect the data and plot the graphs and do the stats – all things that we used to have to do by hand,” Walsh says.

Those roles he expects will survive are those that involve an element of creativity and artistry, along with those that involve a prominent level of emotional intelligence.

“Computers are emotionally illiterate, so people with the most people-focused skills are going to be valued,” Walsh says. “And we will increasingly value things made by the human hand.”

While an AI-based workforce might still be some years away, Walsh says the speed of development of AI means it is important to start having these conversations now.

“Society is going to need to start waking up to the consequences, because we are going to have to change and our educational systems, our economic system, and our idea of work to adjust to the arrival of a lot of automation,” Walsh says.

“Employers have a responsibility to help re-skill their employees, and responsible companies will do that. But we do have to think about how we are going to be reskilling ourselves.”