The Rise of Ai in the Workplace

“These pictures are remarkable! I’ll be using them from now on “Waqar effuses on a new AI text-to-picture tool on Canva that helps generate pretty cool pictures, although not 100% accurate though.

Waqar rethinks his struggle on visiting the graphic designer’s desk and buttering him into sending a picture for the website, and social media. Waqar seems appeased by the fact that he now will seldom visit his graphic designer colleague for the squabbles.

“I got my Email ready in a jiffy!” Tahira seems amazed at the rapid ChatGPT’s response in generating a clear email for her next month’s wedding leave.

She’s thunderstruck that she no longer has to type an email. Instead, she just loads Chat GPt, types in her requirements, and the email material appears like magic.

Professionals have been engaged in enthusiastic conversations about AI wonders in pretty much every office tucked into towers lined on the Shara-E-Faisal commercial district in Karachi.

From writing emails, and reports to creating presentations, images, and even well-defined statistics, it has become quite apparent that Ai is taking over. Its usage can be observed from even the tiniest offices in the city.

If we talk about the global scale, according to Precedence Research, the global Ai industry was valued at a whopping $454.12 billion in 2022 with a 19% growth rate estimated from 2023.

The implications AI is entering into are expanding at an unprecedented rate. This has resulted in a backlash as many professionals have become skeptical of its ethical use.

This year’s Hollywood strike was evidence of the dangers posed by Ai as the artists struggle to maintain their royalties since they have become easily duplicable.

The matter aggravated as the impact reached local households. People now are aware that Ai has arrived to take a part of if not all of their jobs.

A report by Goldman Sach predicts AI will be considered a viable substitute shortly. The report states that around 300 million jobs are to be disrupted by AI.

A plethora of tools have entered the market. These are not your usual tech software. These are mini tools backed by super-large corporations, hyper-investing micro banks, and overly ambitious entrepreneurs. These tools come with a budget to penetrate the market and before you know it, they can become a household name in just a few weeks. These are the new Ai tools being bombarded now and then in the market.

Scroll through Instagram and you shall see a wave of influencers/ creators explaining cool Ai tools that can make your daily work smoother and efficient.

There are two recoiling features about today’s Ai: that it can process a portion of work for you, and the second is that it can rapidly evolve and do other tasks.

Ai Seems to Stunt Human Growth

With Ai tools transforming the market dynamics at a rapid pace, one thing seems to be uncovered. It is a fact that people are drifting away from organically using their creativity and relying heavily on Ai.

The new system therefore is being reshaped and is limiting the human’s natural capability to generate ideas. Psychologists and economists are concerned that the new system will yield an unproductive workforce and will stunt the growth of human capabilities in many aspects.

Furious Resistance

At the moment, the Ai revolution is nascent and has caused a deep resistance to the surface. Search any freelancing platforms such as Fiverr and Upwork and you will come across jobs strictly discouraging the usage of Ai tools and preferring organically written human content.

To me it seems pretty plausible, I would rather read an article prepared by a professional journalist in The Guardian and The Economist than some using Ai tool to rank his website.

Additionally, as someone who is quite active on Linkedin, it has become easier to identify a post crafted by Ai and one that has been written by a human. The moment a viewer realizes that the content might be generated by Ai, the level of interest in that content starts to diminish.

It gives the impression that the content prepared wasn’t through research and expertise but with a simple brief to an Ai tool.

This brings us to an important issue. If professionals do want to stand out, it’s better if they smartly create content using a combination of their expertise and some premium Ai tools.

Whether one finds it too complicated or artificial, one thing is certain Ai is here to stay. To simply criticize Ai as being too generic might be incorrect.

Due to the pace with which it’s advancing, the Ai capabilities we see today in our offices and homes will be improved than the Ai coming in the next 5 years.

Will we see job changes? Yes, a lot. Many menial positions will be replaced. Yes, new ones will emerge, but these new ones will require technicalities to comprehend, many of which are unable to be understood by boomers and even some millennials.

For now, Ai will never replace creativity. But a professional who knows how to streamline daily monotonous tasks with Ai will definitely be having an edge over his/her peers.

A social media manager can get an upper hand by using a bulk scheduling Ai tool while manually responding to chats from customers and leveraging the human side.

At the same time, it could be worse to generate a 30-day content calendar and rely on its quality.

A marketing manager can generate presentation templates within minutes and can easily twist the content with data provided by Ai.

As years will pass, it will become crucial for professionals to learn and adapt new AI-related tools and smartly use them to smoothen their daily workload.

In the end, the future belongs not to the ones who use Ai, and definitely not to those who aren’t. It belongs to those who understand it, and are smart enough to know which parts of it fit the best in their work activities.