With artificial intelligence rapidly advancing, businesses in Rhode Island will have no choice but to invest in the technology tools to ensure they survive.
The workforce and business models of today will be transformed within the next two years, tech observers say. McKinsey & Co. reports that 30% of national hours worked will be replaced by AI, affecting over 12 million jobs in customer support, the generation of creative content, sales and marketing, and many other tasks.
During a panel discussion at Providence Business News’ 11th annual Cybersecurity & Tech Summit at the Crowne Plaza Providence-Warwick on Oct. 12, the question was how to prepare for the coming paradigm shift.
Panel moderator Christopher Parisi, founder and president of marketing firm Trailblaze Inc., said the public shouldn’t view the AI disruption in terms of job “losses” but job “switches.”
With computer-machine interaction increasing in sophistication and the models becoming more complex, the next 18 months may define the next century, said Parisi, who is also host of the “AI Wave” podcast.
In Rhode Island, it’s like “Samuel Slater 2.0,” Arnell Milhouse, co-founder and CEO of the Providence technology training school CareerDevs Inc., said, referring to the father of the American Industrial Revolution. AI is the next commercial and techno-cultural revolution that will disrupt the status quo and redefine both the economy and society, Milhouse said.
“We are standing at the precipice in terms of humanity and our civilization,” he said. “Never before have we faced what we are going to experience over the next 10 years [that is] going to introduce 1,000 years of progress.”
Productivity will increase exponentially, he said, freeing workers for more creative and fulfilling tasks. But while technology needs to be embraced, it must be well regulated and constantly analyzed.
The AI revolution “will unlock an era of creativity,” Milhouse said.
“Everything that you hate about your job is going away. Our lives have an opportunity to drastically improve.”
Generative tasks such as data maintenance and data entry may cease to exist, “but the opportunity you’ll have to show your impact and value to your company is what I’m really excited about,” Milhouse said. “You’ll be able to have an outside impact on the organizations that you work for. People are going to enjoy Mondays more.”
Parisi has been advocating for the McKee administration to create a special task force to create a public framework that can plan for these shifts, which will go beyond Chat GPT or using AI to automatically answer emails or ask Siri for directions.
The state is primed to take advantage of AI for use in the green economy and the Ocean-based blue economy, he said, from ocean sensors, autonomous underwater vehicles, aquaculture and the production of wind farms.
“We can shape a prosperous and vibrant future for Rhode Island,” Parisi said.
Jeffrey Wilhelm, founder and CEO of North Kingstown consulting firm Infused Innovations Inc., agreed that businesses that have not already begun to study the implications of AI are already behind.
“You can’t wait,” he said. “Because the pace of change is increasing.”
Timothy Henry, assistant professor and researcher at Rhode Island College, has witnessed AI’s advancement for decades and said that educating the workforce that will wield these technological powers is vital.
AI is only as useful as the quality of the data that it uses, said Henry, who uses the phrase “garbage in, garbage out” to illustrate the point.
“The [programs] need a lot of data to be useful. Being able to produce good quality data to an AI model is super important,” he said. “I think that’s going to be one of the challenges as we go into this next phase.”
Henry agreed that public officials must begin to formulate policies to make sure that as the private sector cuts overhead costs and puts thousands of people out of work, there are safety net measures in place.
“As we become more productive, we have to have laws that say that you can’t take complete advantage of that,” he said, adding that internal compliance measures must also be put in place. “For the AI to be useful to you, it has to understand your organization and what you do.”
Milhouse said that the benefits will outweigh any economic fallout, but there is always a “dark side,” including the tossing out of institutional and historical wisdom of older citizens gained over decades of experience.
AI will not replace human knowledge but enhance its functional ability.
“We can’t toss away the wisdom of the past,” he said. “But we are going to have to ask ourselves: What does it mean to be human? What is a company? And what is work?”