The future of work could be dominated by artificial intelligence, industry leaders said in Las Angeles this week, predicting it could even take over tasks like answering emails.
While concerns about developments in artificial intelligence harming jobs, Ambereen Toubassy, the chief financial officer of Airtable, said she sees AI as an addition and enhancement to the workday, rather than a replacement.
"We're really excited about AI and we think AI changes fundamentally what people do [and] how they do it," she said on a panel at the Milken Institute's Global Conference. "It should help remove routine and repetitive tasks and focus more on critical thinking and creative thinking. We're excited about helping our customers, help their employees really deploy and take advantage of AI."
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Toubassy admitted that there will likely be some substitution of work by AI, but that it will mostly compliment people to help them do their work faster.
"It helps you learn quickly and deploy yourself to more interesting work," she added. "I actually am pretty optimistic about the fact that people will do more interesting work over time thanks to AI, as opposed to not have work."
Lord Abbett CEO, Doug Sieg, echoed this sentiment, arguing that jobs will become more dynamic and interesting as the pace of technological change continues.
"It makes what are mundane jobs, better jobs," he said. "I don't think it gets rid of people necessarily, but I think it gives them more fulfilling roles. Longer term, I think there's more flexibility."
Igor Tulchinsky, the Founder, Chairman and CEO of WorldQuant, said AI will allow people to get from point A to point B in their daily tasks much faster and explained that point B could actually be something different from what was originally devised because AI has new ideas.
CNBC's Brian Sullivan, who moderated the panel, explained that he gets hundreds of emails a day and asked panelists when AI will be advanced enough to respond to his emails in his voice and manner.
"It can do it now, you just have to be prepared, that's all," Tulchinsky responded. "Generally it can get about 80% of the content correct. So in theory, you only need to spend 20% of the time doing equal amount of work."
"Occasionally you'll get an email that you kind of don't know how to respond to because something happens or it's an unusual circumstance … the AI will know how to respond, it knows the proper etiquette, it knows what to say, you just have to go through it, make sure it's kosher."
He said the accuracy of AI will continue to go up, reaching as high as 99.99%, but warned it is never going to hit 100% because AI "simply doesn't know everything."
"People always think of it as a replacement, it's not it in the end," he said. "In a human conversation, in the way we communicate, some parts are actually mechanical and redundant, so it can generate that part and leave you with special human touch that's so valuable."
From a financial standpoint, Sieg explained that analysts and portfolio managers make money by judgment, so it would be difficult to rely on a computer for human judgment calls on buy and sell decisions.
"I think they [employees] become better by partnering with a tool that can make them smarter, but I don't think it replaces them from that standpoint, not in our business."
In contrast, Rodney McMullen, the Chairman and CEO of The Kroger Co., said AI allows you to do more complex tasks, analyzing three or four things at a time, while an individual can only look at one.
"We're about to see some major transformations arising from the fact that companies up until now had so much information, but no way for the information to be integrated and to be seen by any single entity and to be seen as a whole," Tulchinsky said. "One thing that it can do is it can take a tremendous amount of information, digest it [and] summarize it. The insight of what's going on actually in the companies is increasing, which leads to better jobs, more satisfaction and much higher productivity."
