Creating careers
With the release of ChatGPT into the public domain in November 2022, artificial intelligence, AI, has shifted from science fiction to a reality we must navigate in our lifetime. With over 100 million users, ChatGPT has captured the world’s attention and thrust AI again into the center stage of not only our personal lives but also the business world. Here is an interesting infographic on the history of AI from Live Science to have a deeper understanding of how we got to where we are today.
This then begs the question, where will we go next from today? Many, including the World Economic Forum are already claiming that AI is the fourth industrial revolution and it is upon us now. In a similar way to how the first industrial revolution automated physical labor, the AI revolution promises to automate intellectual labor. This means that not only will the way businesses operate be transformed but that careers will be too. Just like the first industrial revolution did not lead to the population being unemployed, but rather elevated the type of work needing to be done and the skill sets needed to do those jobs, a similar result can be expected from the AI revolution. In fact exciting new career choices are springing up for those interested and dedicated to developing new expertise. One of these exciting new career fields is AI consulting.
Traditional management consulting is a professional advisory service sought out by companies who want guidance on how to address their most challenging business problems. Consulting firms often specialize in particular types of advisory services such as strategy, financial, human capital, compliance, and digital transformation. As AI technology is advancing, AI consulting is emerging as an important aspect of digital transformation consulting. The focus of AI consulting is developing AI strategies to optimize current business operations. This can include automating processes or tasks, improving decision making or enhancing the customer experience. Training and education may also be part of the consulting services to upskill the current employees in how to leverage AI technologies.
It is no surprise that all of the leading consulting firms have a division specializing in AI consulting. Additionally, major tech companies including IBM, Google, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services also offer AI consulting services. New startups offering AI consulting have also emerged. Data Robot offers a machine learning platform and works with 40% of the fortune 50 to provide a range of services to help organizations develop and deploy machine learning models quickly and easily. The platform allows users to automate the end-to-end process of building, deploying, and managing machine learning models, without requiring extensive knowledge of coding or data science.
Big Panda is an AI-powered IT operations platform that helps organizations detect, investigate, and resolve IT incidents by automating the process of incident management, allowing IT teams to focus on higher-value activities. They claim companies have seen benefits including a 400% reduction in escalation and 50% cost cutting by using their platform. Appen is a data partner that specializes in providing high-quality, human-annotated data for training machine learning models to enable organizations to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of their machine learning models. They are used across a range of industries, including finance, healthcare, retail, and e-commerce, to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of their machine learning models. If you are interested in researching more of the key players in this space, check this list from Forbes.
AI is at the forefront of our personal and business lives and will change the way we work forever. While this can threaten some existing career paths, it also creates exciting new opportunities to be involved in shaping the changing landscape of work. AI consulting is an emerging field within digital transformation consulting and is worth examining as a potential career option if you are passionate about the intersection of consulting and technology.
