Work It Podcast: AI is not the bogeyman, use it to solve everyday problems

Every department in a company - from legal to finance and HR - can use a basic AI tool to solve problems or work better.

Agoda’s chief technology officer Idan Zalzberg explains why AI knowledge and tools do not have to be complicated and hard to implement.

Jump to these key moments here: 

• 4:22 AI in the last 10 years
• 5:27 Will AI replace us?
• 10:05 Is AI training enough?
• 15:21 Helping workers see the problem
• 20:05 AMA: Should I reveal my last drawn salary?

Here's an excerpt from the podcast: 

Tiffany Ang:

We've heard the term AI workforce being bandied around, I think maybe not in your space, but I think for the majority of us, many of us don't really understand what that means.

We think AI is here to replace our jobs. So one of the things that I've heard recently is that it may not really actually replace jobs that, I guess, require that face to face interaction, or your cleaners or your garbage collectors and everything, but it may be able to replace, say, higher level jobs. Say, for example, the lawyers, right? I mean, a lot of times you're taking a lot of text and then you are processing it yourself.

Now AI can do that for you. So is AI really here to replace our jobs? Is that a very simplistic way of looking at it?  

Idan Zalzberg:

Yes. So let's start with the first question about, is AI here to replace us and so forth? I'm going to say a few things, a bit cliche, but I think very true.

So first of all, I think fear comes from ignorance first, correct? And I think a lot of us, it's new. It's completely surprising. We didn't expect this to come so it's very natural that a lot of our responses are fear, right? Because that's a very human thing to do. And the way that we battle the fear is with knowledge.

Once we understand it, we know what it can do, what it cannot do, how we can take advantage of it, then that takes away a lot of the fear element of it.

Now the idea that AI will come and replace your job, I think if we look at any inspiration from the past, and it's always good to learn from our history, that's not how things work. I mean, can we have a conversation? How come calculators did not make math (an) irrelevant topic? Yeah, right now, why do people that are the best at math are actually the highest paid people in the world right now. 40 years after we handed calculators to everyone, right? So like, arithmetic is now needed and we still teach it very well.

If you look at other places where computers came in, even graphic design, architecture everywhere, those people actually were not replaced. Those people just stepped up. They became the users of the tool, instead of being replaced by the tool, right?

Tiffany:

Good point. 

Idan:

You do need to worry about, how am I making sure that I'm taking, you know, advantage of this technology. 

But the other fallacy that I want to touch on is this fallacy of fixed work, okay? And that comes off a lot.

“Oh, we don't need more people, because now we have AI to do the job.” It's the other way around.

Like what we do today is not everything that we want to do is a fraction, a tiny fraction, of what we want to do. We want to do much more we just can't afford because we need to pay so many people so much money, we can't afford, as a business to do it. So if now we have our people being able to be two times, four times, 10 times more efficient, we actually can afford to do more.