AI Is Changing Work and Our Relationships

There is an abundance of reports highlighting artificial intelligence’s (AI) impact on how businesses work.

Improvements to productivity and efficiency have dominated the discussion ever since OpenAI unveiled the generative AI tool ChatGPT to the world on 30 November 2022. The tool has reignited interest in AI’s value and potential by offering a fast and accurate way to generate information. According to McKinsey, AI could now contribute USD2.6 – 4.4 trillion annually in economic value.

Another 2023 study revealed that a support agent using AI could handle 13.8% more customer inquiries per hour, while a programmer could code 126% more projects per week with AI assistance. Marketing, sales, and product development are just some of the functions that have also been made more productive by generative AI.

AI’s impact on productivity remains impressive, but it is also creating a remarkable change in how we operate and work. AI’s use changes the relationships and interactions between businesses, employees, and customers. This deserves more attention.

Across the value chain

The insurance industry, which is a sector reliant on human interactions, has undergone a radical transformation thanks to the adoption of AI technologies. Many insurers today have implemented AI not just for its improvements to productivity but also for the changes it brings to how they serve people.

AIA, the largest independent publicly listed pan-Asian life insurance group, is one such organization that has experienced a noticeable change in its ways of working. The insurer has transformed its entire agency value chain with new technologies like AI and analytics, empowering people with sophisticated digital tools at every stage of their career journey. This is changing the way their agents not only interact with each other but with their customers.

AI technology personalizes the way an AIA agent engages their clients so that they are heard and valued. SIM, a proprietary integrated social media prospecting and content-sharing platform, uses AI in some markets to curate and recommend relevant marketing content from AIA’s marketing experts to customers. Agents can use the tool to select appropriate content and share it with their social networks—effectively becoming their own CMO. Such is the success of SIM, which contributed to 2.7 million customer sales leads in 2023.

AI also helps new agents receive fairer assessments during the recruitment process. For example, AI-powered interview tools such as computer vision, voice-to-text, and natural language processing analyze a candidate’s attitudes, communication skills, professionalism, and sociability. Hiring managers can follow up through a Career Aptitude Test Platform, which assesses hiring suitability through a constructed multidimensional candidate profile informed by data, removing subjectivity and bias. This creates not just a faster recruitment process but one that is fairer and more convenient for candidates.

To forge and sustain closer client relationships, insurance agents today use AI-powered tools to make more customer-centric decisions. Data analytics and AI can help build agent behavioral models, which use past interaction data collected from top agents to generate insightful recommendations on optimizing customer outreach and managing sales leads. With the right moves powered by AI, agents can go through a smooth selling process while receiving the insights needed to appropriately address their customer’s buying needs.

AI adoption creates a ripple effect in organizations like AIA, creating opportunities to build customer-serving technologies and user-centric mindsets. AIA has set up communities of practice and academies to improve their understanding of domains like design thinking and data analytics so that they can develop tools to understand better the people they serve. An example is Converge, a 10-month reskilling program that builds business analytics skills across all levels in AIA through apprentice opportunities. Converge has helped to expose 86% of participants to live AIA projects, where they have helped build dashboards for sales conversions.

Preparing for change

Aside from automating mundane and repetitive tasks, AI is transforming how people work and interact with each other for the better.

AI breeds empathy and understanding across functions like marketing, recruitment, and sales by reducing bias, enabling personalized communication, and building stronger relationships. This provides an exciting future for AI that deserves more attention, as it creates new opportunities and challenges for workers across different sectors and roles.

For one, there needs to be a rethink of how the workforce develops its skills. Lifelong learning and continuous learning must become the norm as AI becomes even more embedded in the workplace. There must also be a renewed focus on people-centric skills, such as critical thinking, creativity, emotional intelligence, and communication.

AI’s future lies not just in making us faster but also in making us better and more human.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CDOTrends. Image credit: iStockphoto/metamorworks