Trond Undheim, partner at venture capital firm Vidian Ventures, moderated a discussion at the Global Corporate Venturing Symposium yesterday covering the future of work and the role artificial intelligence (AI) will play.
Undheim began by talking about millennials’ arrival in the workplace, presenting a definition that placed the oldest millennials at nearly 40 years old, meaning an estimated 59% of the workforce will be in the millennial or generation Z age groups by 2020.
Paul Jacquin, managing partner at Randstad Innovation Fund, which invests on behalf of recruitment firm Randstad, suggested the easiest way to get to grips with the future of work is simply to hire millennials.
Jacquin called the human resources sector conservative, pointing out that it used to pride itself on being “20% tech, and 80% human,” before that approach revealed an implicit bias.
Leo Clancy, head of technology, consumer and business services at foreign investment agency IDA Ireland, suggested millennials have more skin in the game considering they have longer careers ahead of them that will likely take place amid tougher economic conditions.
Clancy’s prerogative is to market Ireland for foreign investment and skills, making it a “nexus point” for AI talent, and a recent success involved professional services firm Accenture setting up an 300-strong AI team in the country.
Riffing on European talent, Bo Ilsoe, managing partner at NGP Capital, the VC firm spun off from communications technology provider Nokia, loves working in Europe, and he pointed to AI success stories from around the continent, particularly in Lugano, Switzerland.
Staying on top of the future of work requires skills, which Jacquin suggested should be assessed using AI to make hiring decisions on data.
Undheim asked whether millennials are ready to be assessed, which Jacquin acknowledged was tricky. Returning to the theme of ‘invisible’ tech, millennials are often happy to accept data capture as consumers but not necessarily as candidates. Pymetrics, a Randstad-backed startup that uses games to assess candidates, offers a possible solution to the problem.
Everyone has theories about the future, and Undheim prompted the panellists on the possible impact of a potential economic downturn.
Clancy turned to 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s remarks on the impact of AI on jobs. Yang believes AI has not impacted jobs yet because the going is good. When a downturn arrives, jobs will be the first to go and will be replaced by AI. Then when the economy recovers, jobs will not return because AI will simply scale outwards.
For Clancy, this means that Ireland has to focus on retraining, and described the country as a “fast follower” in policy on that front, suggesting that stance, together with staying agile, as a solution to Undehim’s concerns about whether policy could keep up given the breadth and depth of AI implementation.
Jacquin was blunter, saying the technology is already here and that everyone is now just managing change, pointing out that there is nothing like a crisis to modify behaviour.
Ilsoe recently wrote a blog post that suggested that as AI gains more control in various parts of life, we have to augment human capacity to cope with it while regulation must keep up as much as possible. His final point was to say that technologists are not ethicists: trust must go elsewhere.