IBM CEO Ginni Rometty: AI will change 100 percent of jobs over the next decade

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty: AI will change 100 percent of jobs over the next decade

by | Apr 15, 2019 | News

IBM’s Chair, CEO and President Ginni Rometty has a powerful message for workers and employers in all strata of society: The Fourth Industrial Revolution is underway and it is shaping up to be one of the most significant challenges and opportunities of our lifetime. We are already seeing jobs, policies, industries and entire economies shifting as our digital and physical worlds merge.

Image: Ginni Rometty|Cindy Ord | CNBC

According to the World Economic Forum, the value of digital transformations in the Fourth Industrial Revolution is estimated at $100 trillion in the next 10 years alone, across all sectors, industries and geographies.

“As a result, we face an imminent and profound transformation of the workforce over the next five to 10 years as analytics and artificial intelligence change job roles at companies in all industries,” Rometty said while giving a keynote address at the CNBC’s At Work Talent & HR: Building the Workforce of the Future Conference in New York on Tuesday, April 2. In February, the executive was appointed to Trump’s American Workforce Policy Advisory Board along with 24 other leaders.

While only a minority of jobs will disappear, the majority of roles that remain will require people to work with the aid of analytics and some form of AI and this will require skills training on a large scale, Rometty said.

“I expect AI to change 100 percent of jobs within the next five to 10 years,” the IBM CEO said.

Rometty’s call to action comes at a time when the AI skills gap and the future of work exhibit a growing sense of urgency. The technology sector accounts for 10 percent of U.S. GDP and is the fastest part of the American economy but there are not enough skilled workers to fill the 500,000 open high-tech jobs in the U.S., according to the Consumer Technology Association’s Future of Work survey. Yet the tech industry is concerned that school systems and universities have not moved fast enough to adjust their curriculum to delve more into data science and machine learning. As a result, companies will struggle to fill jobs in software development, data analytics and engineering.

“To get ready for this paradigm shift companies have to focus on three things: retraining, hiring workers that don’t necessarily have a four-year college degree and rethinking how their pool of recruits may fit new job roles,” Rometty said.

To address the issue IBM is investing $1 billion in initiatives like apprenticeships to train workers for what it calls “new collar” jobs – a phrase Rometty has coined for workers who have technology skills but not a four-year college degree. She noted the company is crafting 500 apprenticeships with the goal of making this “an inclusive era for employees.”

The “new collar” jobs could range from working at a call center to developing apps or becoming a cyber-analyst at IBM after going through a P-TECH(Pathways in Technology Early College High School) program, which takes six years starting with high school and an associate’s degree.

IBM is also helping to catalyze a national movement to close the skills gap. IBM and the Consumer Technology Association announced the launch of the CTA Apprenticeship Coalition, to create thousands of new apprenticeships in 20 states in January.

It provides frameworks for more than 15 different apprenticeship roles in fast-growing fields, including software engineering, data science and analytics, cybersecurity, mainframe system administration, creative design and program management. New apprenticeships will be modeled in large part on IBM’s successful apprenticeship program, which launched in 2017, is registered with the United States Department of Labor and has grown nearly twice as fast as expected.

The apprenticeships created by this Coalition provide pathways to tech jobs in all parts of the country — from Kansas to Minnesota to Louisiana — not just in traditional tech hubs on the coasts. Its goal is to widen the aperture when it comes to hiring by placing the focus on skills rather than specific degrees. From early-career professionals to mid-career transitions and everything in between, these apprenticeships represent a new pathway to success in 21st century careers, including the growing number of new collar roles where a traditional bachelor’s degree is not always required. They also offer an opportunity to build in-demand skills without taking on student debt.

Besides IBM, coalition members include Canon, Ford, Sprint, Toyota and Walmart.

In this tight job market, where the talent chase has become so intense, Rometty has some advice for employers at businesses of all sizes. It’s a shift in thinking she has adopted at IBM. “Bring consumerism into the HR model. Get rid of self service, and using AI and data analytics personalize ways to retrain, promote and engage employees. Also move away from centers of excellence to solution centers.”

As she sums it up: “In today’s world company’s need to be agile and realize their workforce is a strategic renewable asset. ”

Artificial-intelligence pioneers win $1 million Turing Award

Artificial-intelligence pioneers win $1 million Turing Award

by | Apr 15, 2019 | News

To learn who’s taking home the Turing Award, people might turn to their trusted talking bots, like Siri or Alexa. Or, in fact, some of the very technology the three winners helped bring to life.

Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun have earned what’s often referred to as the Nobel Prize of the tech world for their pioneering work in artificial intelligence, the Association for Computing Machinery announced Wednesday. The researchers, working both independently and together, helped advance the thinking and application of neural networks, the technology that gives computers the ability to recognize patterns, interpret language and glean insights from complex data.

“Artificial intelligence is now one of the fastest-growing areas in all of science and one of the most talked-about topics in society,” Cherri Pancake, president of the computing society, said in a statement. “The growth of and interest in AI is due, in no small part, to the recent advances in deep learning for which Bengio, Hinton and LeCun laid the foundation.”

The trio’s efforts to popularize algorithms that extract patterns in data was initially met with skepticism, the association noted, but their commitment to artificial-intelligence research has led to breakthroughs in many areas of computer science, including speech recognition, robotics and the ways in which machines interpret digital images and videos.

The process of recognizing languages, environments and objects that billions of smartphone users rely on stems from the work of Bengio, Hinton and LeCun. Their research is poised to fuel further advancements as entire industries embrace artificial-intelligence systems, potentially transforming transportation, medicine and commerce.

AI-powered technologies could unlock a future with autonomous cars or earlier and more accurate medical diagnoses.

However, the advancement of artificial intelligence has also prompted concerns over mass automation and the displacement of human workers.

LeCun is a mathematical sciences professor at New York University and the vice president and chief AI scientist at Facebook. Hinton is a vice president and engineering fellow at Google. Bengio is a professor at the University of Montreal and the scientific director of both Quebec’s Artificial Intelligence Institute and the Institute for Data Valorization.

The Turing Award comes with a $1 million prize, funded by Google, the ACM said. The prize is named after the British mathematician Alan Turing, who laid the theoretical foundations for computer science.

Issue of 2019

Issue of 2019

by | Apr 14, 2019 | Highlights

E-Government is the use of communication and information technology to improve the performances of public sector agencies. The Boston Global Forum and Michael Dukakis Institute announced the concepts of AI-Government on June 25, 2018, as a part of AI World Society Initiative. AI-Government transcends E-Government by applying AI to assist in decision making for all critical public sector functions – most notably provision of public services, performance of civic functions, and evaluation of public officials. Using AI technologies in government is not a new idea, but it still carries considerable benefits in public service areas such as health, transportation, and finance. It does not replace governance by humans or human decisional processes, but instead guides and informs them, providing an objective basis for service provision and evaluation.

One of requirements for developing an efficient AI-Government is building the National Decision Making and Data Center (NDMD). NDMD collects, stores, analyzes, and applies massive amounts of data relevant to the provision of public services and the evaluation of public programs and officials. Also essential are other tasks, such as creating regulations for automated public services, providing mechanisms to evaluate the performance of leaders or officials, facilitating feedback for civil society, and setting rules for decision making in all areas of government.

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In 2018, Boston Global Forum focused on AI with the introduction of our AI World Society (AIWS) 7-Layer Model for Next Generation Democracy at the Boston Global Forum-G7 Summit Conference April 25, 2018 at Harvard University Faculty Club. In 2019, our next step is to continue the mission of expanding our AIWS 7-Layer Model for collaboration on an international scale, and hold discussion about the concepts of AI-Government, together with world leaders, policy makers, and impactful individuals in the tech industry order to build efficient systems of AI-Government that are able to bring significant benefits to society while minimizing any risks they carry as much as possible.