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Companies are betting on artificial intelligence to increase profits while slashing jobs.
For Jamaica, one of the popular usages seems to involve the generation of the content that prefaces financial reports. However, a few companies are digging deeper.
“We actually terminated 19 [workers],” said Ricardo Allen, founder and CEO of One on One Educational Services Limited. They were replaced by one ‘worker’ powered by AI.
“It sounds very bad, but that is the reality,” Allen said as a panellist at the annual CEO Forum hosted by the Jamaica Stock Exchange that delved into AI and its possibilities for business on Wednesday.
Engineers have been developing AI technologies since the 1950s. The technology started gaining in popularity around the 1990s but didn’t truly take off until the turn of this decade.
Now Big Tech companies and others are pouring billions of dollars into the technology, that has risen in popularity to become a buzzphrase, better known by its initialism, AI, mainly due to the emergence of ChatGPT, which was developed and released by OpenAI towards the end of 2022.
It sparked a shift towards generative AI engines, which create responses that mimic the work of humans, including creating text, images, music, audio, and videos. It led other entities to follow including Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot.
The near 20 workers shed by Allen were employed four years earlier to respond to customer queries related to its Bahamas contract. One on One’s education programmes are delivered online.
“Every child in The Bahamas uses our platform to learn,” Allen said.
One on One used the data generated from call responses to train a “simple” AI model. He managed to reduce the time for answers and reallocated resources to other business segments.
That came after an assessment of the company’s expenditures that prompted the question ‘why are you spending this money?’.
Having “hired a new employee” called Una – in reality his team created its own in-house office assistant designed and trained to generate company-specific responses – Allen now tells his staff to ask Una for responses prior to contacting him.
Stephen Price, country manager for Flow Jamaica, said that the telecoms will be using AI to assess its customer base of around one million subscribers in order to generate products and services.
That’s usage on the big data side of AI, but on the generative side, Flow will use AI to enhance its customer chat on Whatsapp along with it website chatbot.
“Our engineers are coding assistants to create various apps and tools to make the process faster,” said Pryce at the JSE forum that was held under the theme ‘Fortifying the CEO: Decision Making in the Age of AI’.
Norman Chen, CEO of tech services provider tTech Limited, expects an unpredictable future with AI, but not one that will be as disruptive as some fear.
“The advent of AI will not result in job displacement but task replacement,” said Chen, who expects a net-neutral effect on jobs. “There might be a job reduction but those jobs will be replaced with higher paid individuals. There will be a shift, but I don’t see an overall job loss in the country,” he said.
Consultant Dr William Lawrence says that AI can increase returns for business due to the various uses to which the technology could be put. Firms can use the generative AI sites or private sites to plug in datasets for analysis, he said, adding that such sites can predict trends that can inform management on adjustments prior to the end of reporting periods.
“We are at the embryonic stages of AI but it can increase your ROE [return on equity],” said Lawrence, a management consultant and founding director of the Professional Services Unit of Mona School of Business and Management, at the University of the West Indies. “Generative AI is here for everyone to make money,” he declared.
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