A tidal wave of disruption caused by AI is about to wipe out your job. That’s the scary headline being pushed by those who see large language models as an existential threat to people who earn a living from coding, copywriting and even marine biology. The question is not – will AI type tools replace humans, but when. And the clock might be ticking for a while.
Some disruptive technologies that took a while to have an impact…
The Spreadsheet
My first job out of university was ‘National Account Analyst’ for Unilever in Australia. The role involved analysing data from different sources and compiling reports from that data.
Back then, the sales data captured by scanning products at the supermarket checkout was printed onto sheets of A4 paper and delivered each week in binders. There was a binder for each state, there were binders for each large supermarket chain and they all had to be combined with data from our internal systems – and at the time, that task was done in a spreadsheet.
I’d used spreadsheets at university, but they were not in common use in business. Like many technologies, people only used a fraction of their functionality. In 1995, I was sent on an advanced macros course for Lotus 123, a spreadsheet that was superior to Excel at the time. I returned to the office and made myself redundant.
Using macros, I created a spreadsheet where the data from the binders only had to be entered once and the macros would create the reports with the click of a mouse. The daily sales report was cut from 3 hours to 10 minutes, the weekly sales report was cut from 8 hours to 30 minutes and the various category review documents were cut from 3-5 days to 4 hours.
A spreadsheet is a fairly blunt instrument. A productivity tool for sure, but couldn’t actually help me deliver what I was actually paid to do – analysis. A spreadsheet could manipulate the data and present it rudimentary charts, but the insight still had to come from a human – preferably one with domain expertise.
Nearly 25 years later, of the millions (billions?) of spreadsheet users around the world, 6% identify as expert users – which is where macro use sits. 27% say they are advanced users – those who use IF statements and pivot tables.
The spreadsheet should have been, and has been, a job killer. While some businesses are over-reliant on this tool, others have never really used it to full potential. Now people are using ChatGPT to ask which formulas should go in which cells!
Ecommerce
Physical Goods
Back in 1999, a romantic comedy starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan brought email to the mainstream. ‘You’ve Got Mail’ wasn’t about email though. It told the story of a small independent bookshop that was going to be put out of business by a larger chain store.
Even though Amazon had made its first online sale in 1995 and by the time of the film had shipped million non-book items around the world, matinee goers were still getting their heads around electronic mail. They couldn’t imagine that the big, corporate bookstore would soon face it’s own battle for survival.
Despite the headlines, the predicted death of the ‘High Street’, ecommerce in the US in 2019 accounted for just 14% of retail sales. On a strictly retail revenue basis, Walmart is twice the size of Amazon with retail revenue of $600 billion versus $280 billion. The pandemic accelerated ecommerce in some segments, but shops are not going away. Not all of them.
Travel
A year before ‘You’ve Got Mail’, Lastminute.com was launched. Not just a new way of selling travel products, but an entirely new business model that was made possible the internet. The physical travel agency should be gone by now, but it’s not – not quite. In 2018, 82% of travel bookings were completed without a human being involved.
Although travel agencies can save travellers up to $500 and four hours of planning time per trip, only 24.3% of Americans use physical agencies to book their holiday. This is probably because most travel is generic ie. a return flight and a single destination per trip.
Travel is one area where AI should be able to eliminate the human travel agent once and for all, and it might – but in the words of another relic destined to be replaced – “That may be so, but not today”
AI will struggle to provide meaningful, personalised travel recommendations without giving it a lot of personal data. There are problems with the current online aggregators, whose recommendation engines maximise for profit rather than customer preferences, but an AI won’t be able to do much better in the short term.
Once again, domain experience is going to give humans the upper hand over an AI in the short term.
Advertising
This might be the closest parallel to what is about to happen. Those of us who were selling online ads in 2000 predicted that it would lead to the death of newspapers, magazines, the outdoor ad business and some television stations. And it did, but perhaps not as quickly as we thought and we didn’t see the downsides.
But like the spreadsheet, digital advertising has not been used to its full potential. The ability to ‘personalise’ and target advertising has been available for decades and yet the broadcast mentality of television and mainstream press is still used by brands as large as Apple.
Newspapers are still here, barely. The ones that adapted best to the disruption survived. Breaking news, and live events is one area where AI will not have a huge impact. (Though an AI could be trained to recognise spikes in keywords and rapid changes in sentiment on a platform like Twitter and create headlines and news ‘stories’)
The importance of brand value and trust was one of the elements that protected newspapers and magazines and will continue to protect them against AI.
Prepare for Disruption
The wave of disruption cause by AI is approaching the beach, but the impact may not be as immediate or all-encompassing as some fear. Disruptive technologies can take a while to have a significant impact, and rarely fully replace the need for human expertise and domain knowledge. Even if AI can automate certain tasks and increase efficiency, it might never be used to its full potential. Whatever happens – you need to have a strategy. This is a Kodak moment, and you need to be prepared.
Talk to me about my 2 day – Preparing for Disruption Workshop
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