In 2023, the world discovered Generative AI.
In 2024, organisations put this technology into practice and delivered value.
According to a McKinsey report on the state of AI, 65% of respondents report their organisations regularly using gen AI.
This was nearly double the percentage from just ten months ago.
With 3/4 of these respondents predicting significant or disruptive changes in their industries due to gen AI, it’s clear that AI is not just a fleeting trend but a transformative force.
AI adoption by organisations hovered around 50% for the last six years. This year, adoption jumped to 72%.
This article breaks down AI’s impact on the economy, its effect on your job, and how you can get ahead in this new AI era.
This article was written by a Financial Horse Contributor.
How AI Affects the Economy
AI is a General Purpose Technology — once-in-a-generation technologies that impact every industry and aspect of life, writes Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor and author of Co-Intelligence.
He writes that General Purpose Technology include steam power or the internet and argues that generative AI might be even bigger in some ways.
“Where previous technological revolutions often targeted more mechanical and repetitive work, AI works, in many ways, as a co-intelligence. It augments, or potentially replaces, human thinking with dramatic results.
Early studies of the effects of AI have found it can often lead to a 20 to 80 percent improvement in productivity across a wide variety of job types, from coding to marketing. By contrast, when steam power, that most fundamental of General Purpose Technologies—the one that created the Industrial Revolution—was put into a factory, it improved productivity by 18 to 22 percent.”
This leap in productivity explains why companies, especially those in the Fortune 500, are rapidly integrating AI into their operations.
Singapore’s National AI Strategy
Singapore recognises AI’s importance to maintain its competitive edge in the global economy.
In December 2023, it announced the Singapore National AI Strategy 2.0, an update to Singapore’s whole-of-nation movement to harness artificial intelligence for economic growth and societal development.
The strategy outlines 15 key areas of focus, emphasising AI’s potential to enhance cognitive and physical tasks and create positive impacts.
In Budget 2024, Singapore announced it will invest over $1 billion into AI development over the next five years. The fund aims to develop AI compute infrastructure, talent and the industry to unlock new areas of economic growth.
Singapore plans to use AI to boost productivity and drive innovation across various sectors, including healthcare, finance, and logistics.
How AI will affect your job?
With AI integrating into the economy, you might wonder how AI might affect your job. While AI is expected to drive significant productivity improvements, its extent on jobs remains uncertain.
Some experts believe that AI, like past technological transformations, will eliminate some jobs, but also create demand for other jobs and augment the nature of many others.
Andrew McAfee is a principal research scientist at MIT who studies how digital technologies are changing business, the economy, and society. In his blog, he argues that AI will not cause massive unemployment.
He believed the translation industry was at high risk of being automated. But translator employment in the US has grown along with wages. Machine-generated translations have become highly accurate, but the value of human translators has increased as they oversee AI-output to ensure quality and consistency in the final product.
While automation has lowered the cost of translation services, it has also enabled human translators to take on more work and remain essential in the industry.
He uses this example to make a broader point that AI, like other technologies, introduce creative destruction.
While it’s easy to see the jobs it will destroy, it’s much harder to see how “humans can add enough value to keep being employed in large numbers”.
As business needs change, so will the skills required of employees. This brings us to the next point — how do you thrive in your job in the AI era?
Getting ahead in the AI era
According to the 2024 Work Trend Index Annual Report, AI will create opportunities as leaders seek to find talent for new roles. Skills are projected to change by 50% by 2030 (from 2016). Generative AI is expected to accelerate this change to 68%.
The report, created by Microsoft and LinkedIn, surveyed 31,000 people across 31 countries to provide actionable insights for knowledge workers.
The first insight is to embrace that change is inevitable.
More than two-thirds of this year’s LinkedIn’s Jobs on the Rise, a list of fastest-growing jobs, didn’t exist 20 years ago. Just like how social media managers didn’t exist in 2000, people will be jobs in 2040 you can’t fathom today.
We won’t know how jobs will change, but we know that opportunities will flow to those willing to skill up, even non-technical talents. Key survey results included:
- 66% of leaders say they wouldn’t hire someone without AI skills.
- 71% say they’d rather hire a less experienced candidate with AI skills than a more experienced candidate without them.
- 77% of leaders say, with AI, early-in-career talent will be given greater responsibilities.
People are already capitalising on this opportunity to get ahead.
Usage of LinkedIn Learning courses related to AI jumped 160% among non-technical professionals, such as project managers, architects, and administrative assistants.
LinkedIn also saw a 142x increase in LinkedIn members globally adding AI skills like ChatGPT and Copilot to their profiles.
What you can learn from AI leaders
AI is still a very new technology, which means people are still figuring out how to make the best use of it. One way to learn more AI skills is to look at what power users are doing.
These are the people at the frontiers who incorporate AI into their daily workflow and save over 30 minutes a day.
They’ve also reported that AI makes their workload more manageable (92%) and boosts their creativity.
What do they do differently compared to non-power users? The survey results show power users are also more likely to:
- Frequently pause before a task and ask themselves if AI can help (+49%)
- Keep trying if they don’t get the perfect response the first time (+30%)
- Research and try new prompts (+56%)
As a new technology, there are no “best practices”.
The most important habit to cultivate is one of frequent experimentation. You will need to explore different ways of using AI to discover what works best for you.
Power users show this effort pays off. It has changed their work patterns in fundamental ways and also helped them to focus on the most important work, feel more motivated, and enjoy work more.
Do you use AI in your work? Share your tips on how you use AI in the comments below!