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2 days ago
- Business
- Scroll.in
A new book suggests ways for professionals to develop AI literacy to thrive in an AI-first world
Some of you would know what BYOD means. Bring Your Own Device refers to a policy that allows employees to bring their own laptops and phones to work, a trend that is a delight to employees, but rankles IT and Security managers who have no choice but to work with disparate operating systems and brands while having to ensure they are safe and secure. It was primarily Apple which ignited this phenomenon as knowledge workers rebelled against the dull uniformity of Windows devices and wanted to bring their cool Apple MacBooks to work. This culture became more widespread in the iPhone and smartphone era, as a proliferation of various models led to fast adoption, the phones' personal nature compelling workers to bring their own phones to work, rather than use the ones issued by corporate IT departments. BYOD was an obvious take on BYOB – where the last 'B' stands for booze – which restaurants and events used to encourage people to bring their own favourites. The 2024 Microsoft and LinkedIn Work Trend Index Report coined the latest acronym in this lexicon – BYOAI, or Bring Your Own AI. The report which polled 31,000 workers worldwide, had a startling revelation: 78 per cent, or almost four out of five, employees were bringing in their own AI tools to work, many times sneaking them in as apps on their smartphones or laptops, even when corporate policy did not allow them to! 46 per cent of employees had started using them six months back, and more than half were reluctant to admit to using AI tools because 'AI makes them look replaceable.' That's not all; the same report stated that two out of three leaders would not hire someone without 'AI skills' and 77 per cent of hiring managers prefer a less experienced candidate with AI skills over a more experienced candidate without them! Correspondingly, 71 per cent of professionals believe AI will lead to early-career talents taking on greater responsibilities. Note that this report is a year old at the time of writing, a lifetime in this age of AI. The numbers would be even greater and more startling now. Regardless, it is clear that AI aptitude or literacy is a central hiring factor, with AI-literate professionals having a clear advantage in the job market and AI literacy a defining factor in career growth. Think of an accountant in the eighties still insisting on using tables, pen and paper to balance their books even as spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel took over the business world, specifically in the world of finance and accounting. The traditional accountant who refused to embrace this new technology would not last a week. In the same way, AI proficiency or literacy is no longer optional; it is as necessary as knowing how to work on a computer or using a spreadsheet or word processor. It is clear that the rapid adoption of AI in the workplace is not just changing how we work; it is reshaping hiring and talent management. Organisations are beginning to prioritise AI skills over traditional experience, recognising that AI-literate professionals bring a competitive advantage. We are on the cusp of a new era – one defined by AI and its rapidly evolving capabilities. AI is no longer a distant, futuristic technology, but an integral part of our daily lives. From chatbots that assist with customer service to AI-powered marketing campaigns and automated legal research, AI has seamlessly woven itself into the fabric of our work and personal lives. Most of us think of AI as ChatGPT, but there is a whole world much beyond it. In fact, ChatGPT, at last count in March 2025, had ten different models and sub-models in its dropdown options. There are new product and feature releases by OpenAI almost on a weekly basis. The stunning Image feature released on March 2025 produces realistic images, which seem to be designed by expert graphic designers. The images, especially those that looked like the ones designed by Studio Ghibli, attracted millions of users, leading to appeals by Sam Altman to slow down since the OpenAI 'GPUS were melting'!2 Beyond ChatGPT are several foundation models from Google, Anthropic, X, Mistral, DeepSeek and many others. Then there are the hundreds and thousands of applications being built on top of these models. But the impact of AI and GenAI go beyond just helping us summarise documents, write poems or design recipes and ad copies. AI and GenAI both promise and threaten to impact jobs, work, society, geopolitics and even humanity. As we wrote earlier, Gartner was prescient when it said that 'AI is not just a trend or technology, but a fundamental shift in how humans and machines interact.' The metatrends of AI described below will hopefully lift you above the noise and speculation to help you understand why AI is the fundamental technology of our time and will impact the very foundational principles of humanity. English is the new coding As Gen X was growing up, especially in countries like India, we were told that learning English was the passport to success. We did that faithfully and were arguably successful in our careers and businesses. Our children, in turn, are told that learning how to code is the passport to success, thus coding has become the new English, leading to 10-year-olds being dragged to code camps to learn Python and JavaScript. With GenAI, this changes: every time we write an English prompt for ChatGPT or any of its ilk, we are actually 'coding', i.e. giving it a set of instructions to perform some task for us, whether a summarisation or a video creation or writing up an article. Except, now we're doing it in our natural human language, rather than the language of the machine. This is a very profound development, as it has the potential to democratize coding with, potentially, every educated person on earth being able to write code in their own natural language. Microsoft's Satya Nadella mused that instead of learning the machine's language, machines would have to learn ours; Jensen Huang of Nvidia was of the same opinion, saying that the true potential of AI is that none of us would have to learn how to code. Thus English, or any other natural language, becomes the new coding. AI is the new UI AI becomes the new user interface (UI). Bill Gates presciently wrote in November 2023: '… you won't have to use different apps for different tasks. You'll simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do.' UI has defined how humans and machines have interacted with each other, evolving from the difficult UIs of machine language and DOS to GUI (Graphical User Interface), search bars, browsers and apps. Simpler and friendlier UI led to a faster, intuitive and more productive interaction with a machine. The AI-driven fundamental shift will lead to voice UI, as the spoken word becomes the new way to interact with machines, similar to interactions with other humans. We will chat with ChatGPT or Gemini to work with them on our day-to-day tasks. Our devices will morph with voice becoming the primary interface, rather than a large screen. The first proto devices are already out, even if not tremendously successful yet, like the Rabbit R1 and the AI Pin. But all in all, an AI assistant is fast becoming the new UI. AI and humans are the new creators GenAI is a cognitive technology, and can perform creative tasks like writing articles and poetry, as well as creating art. This has left many human creators deeply worried about their jobs and vocations, as creativity was supposed to be a uniquely human skill. We believe, however, that GenAI will boost human creativity. Take OpenAI's Sora, for instance: When Sam Altman had teased it to us in 2024, he had invited creative prompts on X to instantly generate videos with the same. Indian entrepreneur Kunal Shah famously gave 'A bicycle race on ocean with different animals as athletes riding the bicycles with drone camera view' and Sora produced a spectacularly creative video. However, it was not Sora, which was being creative but Kunal, who would not have imagined a creation like this, unless he had a tool like Sora or Veo or Kling to manifest his innate human creativity. Thus, I believe, that the combination of humans and AI will give rise to a new era of creativity. AI creates a new customer The Industrial Revolution brought with it the transactional industrial customer who rarely used technology, and the internet brought the digital comparison-driven social customer who searched and clicked her way through brands. A new kind of customer will emerge in this age of AI – someone who lives in the era of infinite hyperpersonalised choice, has immersive and conversational interaction with brands, uses AI that anticipates her needs, helping her build a brand relationship that is collaborative rather than functional or emotional. This will mean a gut-wrenching change in business and marketing, as industries race to adjust to this new reality. Agents are the new platform If 2023 was the year when ChatGPT reigned, and 2024 was when a thousand LLMs bloomed, 2025 will be the year of AI agents Bill Gates blogged about in 2023 with keen foresight: 'In the next five years … you'll simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do … and software will be able to respond personally because it will have a rich understanding of your life. This type of software – something that responds to natural language and can accomplish many different tasks based on its knowledge of the user – is called an agent.' So, if you plan a vacation today, it means several hours spent tapping across multiple apps before you book a satisfactory itinerary. However, a future booking agent could select a hotel and airline based on your past preferences and pricing, design a daily itinerary based on your known interests and then proceed to book flights and restaurants, after you have given permission and the agency to do so. Sarah Hinkfuss of Bain Capital described this well: 'We are used to 'pulling' information from computers, (AI agents will) 'push' finished work to us instead'. Hundreds of startups have heard his clarion call to build agents on top of the LLMs that Big Tech is rolling out – Microsoft with CoPilot Wave 2, Google with Gemini 2, Salesforce with AgentForce and so on. Minday scours the Internet and mines your preferences to find the best restaurant around you, while Relevance AI automates prospect meetings for harried sales reps. The CEO of the fintech firm Klarna announced that customer service agents built on OpenAI platforms have 'replaced' 700 human agents. It is pertinent to note that no employees were replaced here; but new contact centre roles were taken by AI agents, though under supervision by human beings.
Indian Express
24-04-2025
- Business
- Indian Express
Microsoft Work Trend Index 2025: Firms with hybrid human-AI agent teams on the rise
'Intelligence is becoming abundant, affordable and available on demand,' Microsoft said on Wednesday, April 23, in its newly released fifth annual Work Trend Index Report. The latest edition of the report contains insights related to labour and hiring trends based on a survey of 31,000 people from 31 countries as well as trillions of anonymous and aggregated signals from emails, meetings, and chats within Microsoft 365. The report signals the emergence of a new type of organisation called the 'frontier firm'. This new category of organisations are different from conventional firms as they come with access to intelligence on demand and comprise hybrid human-AI agent teams. The Microsoft report recommended what leaders and employees should do to embrace this shift in the work landscape. With the rapid rise of AI agents that can reason, plan and act as digital labour, companies can scale capacity as needed, the report read. Why would leaders need a blueprint? The report begins by acknowledging that we are entering a new reality, one in which AI can reason and solve problems in remarkable ways. As AI agents are gaining increasing levels of capability, the report states that organisations must navigate the challenge of preparing for an AI-enhanced future. 'Human ambition, creativity, and ingenuity will continue to create new economic value and opportunity as we redefine work and workflows.' As per the report, the new frontier firms are structured around on-demand intelligence and powered by 'hybrid' teams of humans and AI agents, scaling rapidly, operating with agility, and generating value faster. The report predicted that in the next 2-5 years, every organisation will be on its way to becoming one. While 81 per cent of leaders said this is a pivotal year to rethink key aspects of strategy and operations, 81 per cent of them also said that they expect AI agents to be moderately or extensively integrated into their company's AI strategy in the next 12-18 months. On the other hand, AI adoption is accelerating, with 24 per cent of leaders saying that their companies have already deployed AI organisation-wide, while 12 per cent remain in pilot mode. Human-AI agent teams will upend the org chart The report stated that now with expertise being available on demand, the traditional organisational chart may be replaced with a work chart that is a dynamic, outcome-driven model where teams form around goals, not functions, powered by agents that expand employees scope, allowing more impactful ways of working. As many as 46 per cent of leaders said that their companies are using AI agents to fully automate workflows or processes. According to the report, the number one reason employees turned to AI over a colleague is its 24/7 availability. However, functions, especially those that require judgement, empathy, or creative thinking, rely more heavily on humans. The report said that in order to maximise the impact of these human-agent teams, companies will need a new metric – the human-agent ratio. Employees as AI agent boss With AI agents increasingly joining the workforce, the report predicted that there will be a rise in AI agent bosses – a professional who builds, delegates to, and manages agents to amplify their impact. According to the report, every worker, from the boardroom to the front line, would need to think like the CEO of an AI agent-powered startup. Already, 28 per cent of managers are considering hiring AI workforce managers to lead hybrid teams of people and agents, while 32 per cent plan to hire AI agent specialists within the next 12 to 18 months. Leaders also expect that their teams will be redefining business processes with AI, building multi-agent systems to automate complex tasks, training agents, and managing them within the next five years.
