There has been considerable hyperbole about the use of AI, and its impact on potential job elimination, replacement etc., generating levels of fear. AI has been around in different forms for some time in the fields of computation, but with the advent of “Chat GPT” and “Bard” we are in the realms of words rather than in addition to numbers and digits.

This presents new challenges as it expands into new areas. How will this effect professions like journalism, copywriting, law, and even developmental services? This of course has the power to release people from more mundane and repetitive tasks. The legal sector for some time has had electronic basic contract generation, which is becoming more sophisticated with online checking, but with ultimate arbitration from an experienced lawyer at the right level. This will only get more sophisticated with only the more bespoke and complex documents being generated or validated by senior lawyers as AI develops.

Concern has also been raised in the arena of copywriting, however having spoken to professional copywriters the level of specific and deep research the current incarnation of Chat GPT and others can carry out is not relevant enough for sophisticated clients. These aspects all lead us to the importance of not just upskilling employees, which is a leadership imperative, as a means of both preparedness and engagement, but also a re-think on our education approach at all levels.

Traditionally a large part of our western education has been based on knowledge acquisition. This will have to change with the advent of AI as the knowledge is in the metaverse. For it to be used effectively, it will have to be structured correctly and validated. This will mean our new crop of “learners” will have to be educated and skilled in deeper research, problem solving, critical thinking and validation techniques. This will be a pivotal challenge for our educators.

Finally in a coaching context, certain quarters of the community have concerns that AI coaches and coaching bots could replace human coaches. At TCB we are encouraged by the recent research carried out by Professor Erik de Haan of Hult/EF Business School. On a recent webinar he was able to demonstrate although an AI coach could help participants with goal-oriented tasks to an equivalent level of a human coach, there was no impact of an AI coach in relation to activities and approaches that require, resilience, emotion intelligence and dealing with stress. Human coaches still have a place in society which is comforting. AI can help with research and short cut transactional processes leading to more time for human centric and rewarding work. This article was not generated by an AI Bot.