New career paths, AI one-uppery, and more CX trends
INSIDE THE BLACK BOX
Breaking down the latest in AI, customer service, and technology — so you don’t have to.
FRONT-END DEVELOPMENTS
🖤 WE’RE LOVING: Breathe easy, AI scientists make clean energy breakthrough 🔮 WE’LL SEE: Neuralink patient controls computer mouse with mind, says Musk ⚠️ SAY LESS:Air Canada fails to equip AI with accurate info and loses in court
BACK-END BREAKDOWN
Gen Z workers are embracing AI — who’s really coming for the jobs?
We’re still seeing a lot of talk around AI taking jobs, but Gen Z knows better. Handshake reports a third of 2024 grads are planning to use AI in their professional lives.
🔢 SEMANTICS
The report cites a 75% monthly increase in AI skills added to Gen Z profiles in 2023 on LinkedIn — which recently added a new AI assistant to give job-seekers a leg up
48% of Gen Z thinks AI will advance their careers by providing faster knowledge access
57% of Gen Z respondents and 62% of millennials are more excited about benefits of AI than worried about the risks
📈 SENTIMENT ANALYSIS
It’s time to stop blaming your professional woes on AI, and figure out what AI can do for you. If you don’t have something novel to add to the conversation, sit back, relax, and watch the rest of our careers take off.
Google vs. OpenAI: The drops don’t stop
The one-uppery between these two soared this month, with each tech giant unveiling groundbreaking new AI models and product features. Let’s round ‘em up.
🔢 SEMANTICS
First, Google announced its Bard glow up, Gemini, and rolled out paid subscriptions to Gemini Advanced. Then, they introduced the next gen Gemini 1.5 Pro. A week later, they launched open source model, Gemma. This week, they unveiled Genie, AI that can build video games from text or image prompts.
Open AI announced optional memory features for ChatGPT to remember past conversations. It also introduced Sora, its text-to-video AI model. They also made moves to update the GPT store in an effort to become “the next app store,” with GPT ratings and feedback.
📈 SENTIMENT ANALYSIS
Apparently, even more announcements from both parties are on the way. It’s like watching a marathon that will never end, and amusing all the same. Let’s see if they can both keep up the pace.
VENN ZERO
Alongside the incredible momentum, Google and OpenAI both suffered a major flop this month. Each party took to X to make apologies and respond to the controversy.
The growing capacity to course-correct AI agents hints at a broader trend in 2024. Smart companies are increasingly treating their AI agents not like a piece of software but like an actual employee. Brands seeing the greatest return from their AI investments have quickly discovered that it's not enough to simply buy an agent and set it loose. To thrive, that worker needs to be onboarded, measured and coached — like any other employee.
And those tasks call for a new breed of manager we'll see more of in 2024.
AI employee manager is already a key role at companies like money management firm Wealthsimple, one of our clients. Along with setting goals for their AI agents, giving them feedback and helping them learn, AI managers must bring data analysis, project management and technical skills to the table. It represents a true leadership role — one with the potential to make an outsized impact on business results — and will become an important career stepping stone for young professionals across industries in 2024.
Sooner rather than later, AI agents will start collaborating with each other, too. For example, a customer service AI agent inside a streaming platform might notice that a login button is broken for iOS users. Time to alert the code generation AI agent to issue a fix. These generalist and specialist agents will need a new class of "HR" to coordinate them. At first, that job will likely fall to the CIO, who will turn to new dashboards to track the AI team's performance, analogous to performance management software for people.
"[GenAI]... should be treated differently than other technologies because it behaves more like a colleague than previous software." - Harvard Business Review
