'We're in a new era here in talent and onboarding and HR in general'
Canadian companies seem to be fully committed in understanding how critically important AI will be to future business success.
But many are having trouble bringing on enough AI talent and skills into the organization, according to a new survey done by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
“We found that employers are willing to pay 25% more if they have talent on their team that has some of the AI skills that we’re talking about but at the same time, they’re having a very difficult time finding people that have these skills,” says Coral Kennett, head of education, Canada at AWS in Vancouver.
“Two-thirds of employers were saying that they want to hire this talent but three-quarters of them were saying that they couldn’t find the talent that they were looking for so it definitely was able to quantify what we suspected already, is that there’s a gap there in between what the employers are looking for, and what they see is available to them.”
The survey heard from 2,126 respondents (507 employers and 1,619 employees) via an online survey that was conducted between Oct. 3 to 16.
AI will become even more widespread, found the survey as 83% of Canadian businesses expect to deploy the technology widely by 2028.
Many leaders are reluctant to deploy AI in decision making, according to another study.
CEOs have big plans for AI
These results mirror those found in a similar survey conducted by IBM.
“A CEO study on AI showed that 78% of CEOs say they have a clear plan for advancing AI in their organization the next five years. It’s on top of everyone’s mind right now and one of the key benefits is 48% of them thought the key benefit is productivity gains,” says Roberto Bernabo, business transformation leader consulting at IBM Canada in Ottawa.
The research heard from 369 executives from U.S., U.K., Australia, Germany, India and Singapore in April and May.
Studies like this seem to indicate organizational transformation will reach new heights due to the advanced technology, says Bernabo.
“We’re in a new era here of AI in talent and onboarding and HR in general. Companies need to rethink the approach they’re taking, and certainly it needs to be an AI-first approach. HR as an example, AI and automated technologies, they’re going to increase the productivity and just reduce overall costs and I think that’s essential for Canadians companies in the workforce: they want to accomplish their goals faster than ever before by increasing productivity,” he says.
Digging more deeply, 70% of businesses expect to use generative AI within the next five years, found the AWS survey, which further highlights its coming importance.
“It’s very important to them, according to the results of the survey that we just put out there and a lot of employers are really trying to figure out different ways that they can use this technology. It’s both on the side of skilled talent for technical skills in terms of actually building out AI applications and different things that they want to do but then also on the business side; finding people who understand how to use these technologies so really on both sides there seems to be that gap,” says Kennett.
For HR, there is no better time that today to prepare for the impact AI will have, according to Bernabo.
“I think it’s important to understand and to be really be cognizant is that, AI skills have to be the centre of your workforce strategy. We want to make sure that our employees have the opportunity to gain a basic understanding of AI, figure out how to work creatively and responsibly with AI.”
It’s also imperative for users of the technology to ensure its application is bias-free, according to participants on a recent panel discussion.
Fear of technology replacing humans
With AI finding its way more into organizations, do people have to worry about it taking their jobs? Not anytime soon, says Kennett.
“It’s something that comes up often and really, this is similar to a lot of other major technological transformation activities that have happened. What we found in the past is people worried that the industrial revolution or personal computers or cloud computing was going to take over and jobs were going to be eliminated but we really haven’t seen that in the past and we don’t expect that to be the case here either.”
“What it’s going to do is create a different category of jobs, and really elevate and cut some of the things that we’re doing. It’s really more of a transformation than eliminating jobs.”
Instead, employees should look forward to having more AI technology in the workplace, says Kennett.
“It helps them to maybe take some of the things that were more manual tasks and make those automated, so that we can really have employees doing things that are a bit more in terms of the use cases or the applications of these technologies and that should be exciting for people to think about what’s going to be possible and what they can start to do with these things, rather than focusing on things that were maybe more manual tasks in the past.”
