MANILA, Philippines – Accenture Philippines’ country managing director and technology lead, Ambe Tierro, shared her advice for the workforce facing the coming of a new technology, generative AI: “Be open to learning new things.” 

Tierro made the remark at a recent company event where they discussed a new survey on C-suite executives, which found that a whopping 97% of those surveyed said that generative AI will be transformative to their company and industry. About 99% said they plan to amplify their investments in AI. 

In short, nearly all companies are leaning towards employing the technology, and workers will have to adapt. Companies have expressed a willingness to adapt to, with 7 in 10 organizations planning specific training programs to use generative AI tools. 

Tierro said, “In BPO work, we believe that parts of it will be automated, and a lot of it will be augmented, which will create a better employee experience for agents. It’ll be easier to train them. They feel like they have the tools at their fingertips.” By “augmented,” the company means a hybrid setup of humans being assisted by generative AI.

Accenture demoed a chat assistant that the company uses for internal communications that is able to make reply recommendations, and is able to determine the tone of a person whether they are angry, happy, disappointed or feeling other emotions. A user can also ask the chat assistant to create a response in various styles such as speaking like a close friend or, as they demonstrated, in “bro speak”. 

A similar chat assistant is already deployed for some, not all, BPO workers in Accenture. 

A similar tool was described in an April 2023 report by the Stanford Digital Economy Laboratory, and the MIT Sloan School of Management that helped BPO workers increase productivity by 13.8% on the average, with entry level workers showing the highest boost at 35%. 

‘Hard to predict effects on labor’

At least one tech expert has warned that while new professions come with new technology, generative AI will be “different,” and that the real question is the “timescale” over which new opportunities can cover for immediate jobs lost. 

Asked about the timescale question, Tierro herself admits that it’s hard to predict generative AI’s effect on labor, but said she would be rather optimistic. “One data point I want to share is that 60% of job roles we have today did not exist in 1940. I think we will keep creating new jobs for ourselves because technology is evolving, in particular, generative AI.” 

“So one of the messages is really for people to be open to learn new skills, and see that with LLMs, the key is language, and Filipinos are good with language. So if you’re in this industry, and you’re willing to re-skill, I think you can take on other posts as prompt engineer or conversation designers – because these are new roles being created because of the new technology.”  

Tierro also gave the example of computer coding, and how generative AI has lowered the barrier of entry to that. “Now, you don’t need to be a computer science graduate to start to code. They can use [GitHub] Co-pilot (a AI-enabled coding tool) and they can participate in the ideation phase,” she said.

An August 2023 study by IBM had similar findings: companies are prioritizing computer and IT skills less, and are valuing people skills more in the age of generative AI. 

While Tierro underlined the need for talents to be open to learning, Accenture also stressed that a company’s own efforts are necessary, and advised companies to ramp up investing on building relevant skills for employees, exploring use cases, but also to define “top-led responsible AI principles.”

The company also announced in June that it was investing $3 billion to “help clients across all industries rapidly and responsibly advance and use AI to achieve greater growth, efficiency and resilience.” – Rappler.com