Will A.I. really replace your job? CEOs don’t seem to think so.
“I talk to a lot of CEOs, and I’ve learned very quickly that they are not thinking of AI replacing us—I can say that with full authority,” said Ronnie Sheth, CEO of SENEN GROUP, an Austin, Texas-based strategic advisory firm whose bread and butter is helping companies unlock and integrate AI into their workflows. Sheth spoke with Fortune about the perils and potential of AI implementation during an interview at London Tech Week earlier this month.
The fear and speculation of AI snapping up jobs has crept into every industry. Amazon has recently laid off over a hundred customer service workers, Fortune’s Jason Del Rey reported, part of its continual effort to trim costs and invest in automation. New reports from the New York Times and from Citigroup both caution entry-level bankers and financiers about their risk of replacement, and just last month, Sinovation Ventures CEO Kai-Fu Lee said he anticipates AI will replace 50% of human jobs in the next decade.
But individual CEOs might remain wary, Sheth said. She name-checked a large construction firm that’s a SENEN client. “I just talked to their CEO who’s—obviously, as a construction leader—thinking about robots, and AI algorithms that could be used to do some of the menial tasks on the ground.” The boss wasn’t sold, she said. “A lot of workers were asking him whether AI would affect their jobs. He told them, ‘No, but it is going to increase your safety.’ That’s how CEOs are thinking about this differently. And that’s the right way to think about it.”
Perhaps that’s cold comfort to the CEOs who are getting nervous about their own utility, and whether they themselves might one day be replaced. Sheth’s not worried there, either—at least not for the effective leaders.
“As CEO, my job is to do a few things,” Sheth said. “Manage culture. Lead the company in a direction where it doesn’t go bankrupt. To drive sustainable growth. To really improve the community that I’m in.”
Sheth said many CEOs are more concerned with human aspects of business, such as branding and connecting with customers, than they are with cold numbers.
Her clients—which span Fortune 500 companies like Nike and IBM to start-ups and NGOs—have been willing to let go of their short-term revenue and growth goals in order to invest in sustainable, viable brand expansion.
“I’m not going to name names, but there are some very, very big retail brands that we worked with, who have gotten into some interesting times, because they decided to just swing big on AI and forget about their brand,” Sheth said. “Not a smart idea. They’re having to backpedal into branding.”
Replacement theory
In the short-term, no jobs will be “truly, successfully replaced,” Sheth predicted. “But if we think 10, 15, 20 years down the road—maybe assembly line jobs? Maybe a little bit of bookkeeping, maybe just a little bit of base marketing activities, data entry administrative work.”
Sure, she said, those can be replaced or outsourced, but that doesn’t mean the people who have been doing those jobs are going to be left without other options. “I think there’s a balance between rescaling the labor force and also setting policies in place to ensure that AI is being used for human good, and not taking away people’s livelihoods.”
It’s the responsibility of business leaders—and even public sector government officials, Sheth said—to consider how to mitigate AI’s impact on working professionals. Going a step further: “I don’t believe that a company that says they want to be AI-centric or data-driven is on the right path,” Sheth said. “You are not value-driven, and you are not value-centric. You are what you focus on.”
The perils of data over people
Drawing on the years of projects Sheth’s company has done with major firms, she said she’s noticed that “the companies that come to me and say, we want to do more with data. We want to be data-driven, we want to be data-centric—they are the companies that are set up for failure.”
That failure stems from one-track-mindedness—focusing on numbers rather than people. “On the flip side, the companies that say, ‘we’ve got all this data, now how do we unlock value for the business, for our customers, for our employees, for our community?’ It’s a different frame of mind.”
The difference between the two, she said, is chasing the answer to becoming data-centric, versus unlocking value for individuals. “As business leaders, we really need to start focusing on ensuring that policy and regulation are very, very, very clear on human centricity and we need to ensure that AI does not stunt human innovation,” Sheth said. “Right now, we’re seeing a lot of fear-based regulation, fear-based policymaking. I really want innovation to come through, without compromising on human value.”
