The breadth of potential impacts of AI and automation is limitless, particularly in the face of ongoing talent shortages and looming economic volatility. But what will help decision-makers most in 2023? How will the landscape continue to evolve and what are the most proactive paths forward?
With every twist and turn taken this year, leaders across all industries often pause to reflect on the triumphs and tribulations experienced over the last 365 days to share the opportunities they see taking shape in the days, weeks and months ahead.
Here are four predictions for 2023 from Hyperscience executives:
Leave Lengthy Sales Cycles in the Past
Whenever leaders evaluate new technology and strategize their digital transformation journeys, the sales cycle and adoption process gets extremely drawn out.
There is an incredible amount of education needed when navigating new technology, especially regarding artificial intelligence, as customers lack the understanding of what it is, how to use it, and what internal resources are needed to fully realize the benefits. Making AI work in 2023 will require much more attention to the educational aspects of the technology, so we can get more leaders up to speed—faster—and shrink the timeline between interest and execution.
—Chris Ranalli, Chief Revenue Officer
AI Ethics Guidelines Are Here To Stay. 2023 Will Indicate Just How Much Organizations Care.
The White House’s Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights has sparked a discussion on what ethical AI should look like and whether these guidelines should be decided by the industry or with legislators. Considering the constant progress of technology and the nuances of ethical AI, regulations will be best kept if left to the industry and its knowledgeable practitioners to create self-regulating guidelines. Many of today’s leading companies who work with AI have already created efforts to support ethical frameworks like the Blueprint the White House issued, if not more specific to their business and industry.
While it’s great to see the conversations take off this past year, going into 2023 this Blueprint will do little to motivate organizations to prioritize ethics, seeing as it’s merely guidance, not legislation. To create a push towards prioritizing ethical AI in 2023, organizations who do have guidelines in place can encourage and educate others in the industry, whether it is through industry events or having vendors educate their customers as part of the partnership. Any meaningful progress in 2023 will occur when organizations spark the conversation themselves, working together to uplift the industry to promote ethical AI.
—CF Su, VP of Machine Learning
The Reign Of The Augmented Employee
For a long time, article after article I came across asserted that robots would eventually take our jobs. But I believe we are decades, even centuries, away from a reality where we don’t have enough work for people to do. Every time that prediction rears its head, jobs are displaced and evolve, but more jobs and work are ultimately created.
2023 will mark the end of the widespread thinking that “robots will replace humans at work” and shift towards “robots will augment humans at work.” A recent article in The New York Times by Farhad Manjoo, “In the Battle With Robots, Human Workers Are Winning,” argued that machines and software would aid human work, not replace it, and is best summed up with this line: “Radiologists who use A.I. will replace radiologists who don’t.” Technology can detect common diseases better than the best radiologists, and healthcare organizations and doctors embracing this software will see more business than those not.”
Human and machine collaboration is the way forward and is the best way to increase labor productivity and outcomes.
The answer and prediction for 2023 (and beyond) is to invest in human capital alongside investments in software and machines. This will also give rise to MLOps (Machine Learning Operations) teams, where jobs to do basic data entry might fall by the wayside. We may also see teams and departments emerge to design, build, and optimize ML models. If the machine is learning, people must be teaching. Our teams should be upskilled, trained, and increasingly working on less mundane parts of the value chain—after all, the machines don’t mind picking up dull and mindless work tasks.
—Charlie Newark-French, Interim Chief Executive Officer
Providing Space for Creativity is the Secret to Retaining Engineering Talent
Developer and technical burnout are reaching unprecedented levels that we must course-correct in 2023. Development and engineering are fundamentally creative roles, tasked with building projects based on existing codebases or from scratch. Retaining talent in today’s competitive landscape requires letting individuals push the envelope and explore innovation with minimal boundaries. However, doing so successfully will require some parameters for projects.
It will be critical for leaders to ensure development teams aren’t left feeling they only do busy work or are ‘feature’ factory workers. Building things that have no value or impact on business, workflows, or society will feel meaningless and empty, not feelings we want to spark as we curb burnout. So first, require your teams to formulate a hypothesis on the business value the project will accomplish if successful.
Additionally, as you provide more space to innovate, leveraging automation and technology solutions to support some of the lower-value, repetitive tasks will afford teams more time to focus on projects that flex their creativity and move the needle for what’s possible in the new year and beyond.
—Tony Lee, Chief Technology Officer
What do you predict for 2023?
