Which Country Will Automate its White-Collar Workforce First?

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“Artificial intelligence will probably replace 50% of human jobs within ten years.” – Kai-Fu Lee, former Head of Research for Google, China

By 2020*, almost a third of companies believe AI’s greatest impact will be in sales, marketing or customer service.

The uses of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to and grow and the race to develop new AI technologies has been dubbed “the new space race”. After already becoming a seamlessly integral part of daily life for most, it’s no wonder why some businesses are turning to AI to supplement the workforce and help rapid business growth. Instant Offices’ Head of Marketing, John Williams considers how work life as we know it is set to change.

Which white-collar occupations are most likely to be impacted by AI?

The following white-collar occupations are among the likeliest to be taken over by AI in the future:

• Telemarketing 99%
• Bookkeeping 98%
• Reception 96%
• Proofreading 84%
• IT support 65%

Where Is AI Investment Growing the Fastest?

· United States

As the country with the most AI businesses, the US is the global market leader for AI, with a market share of 40%.

· China

China, the world’s second-largest AI ecosystem with around 11% of all AI companies based in the country, plans to invest at least $7 billion in AI by 2030.

· Israel

Third in the world for AI solutions, with a market share of 11%

· United Kingdom

The UK is the AI leader in Europe, with a market share of 7%

Common Office Tasks Making Way for AI

The first wave of AI and machine learning (ML) in the workplace is underway, automation has been making its way from being only used in the service and manual labour industry to also being an integral part of high-skill jobs. In fact, AI is already being used in a number of high-skill white collar professions to automate and improve time-consuming tasks; over two thirds of employees are willing to embrace the growth of AI in the workplace, despite 1.8 million jobs potentially being on the line.

• Legal: Law firms are using AI to find and review important information and documents.
• Human Resources: More firms are using AI for recruitment purposes.
• Customer Service: Instead of human customer service providers, intelligent bots are being used to have online conversations with customers and answer their questions.
• Medicine: AI is being used to diagnose patients.

The second wave of AI in the next ten years will be more focused on white collar jobs, starting with repetitive office tasks. Filing, indexing, document preparation and clerical tasks will become increasingly automated. Advanced AI in the next 30 to 40 years will start to significantly impact higher-skill jobs.

Legal and medical professions will also be highly impacted by AI. Beyond the office, we’ll likely also see transport, performing arts and even culinary services changing drastically as machine-based intelligence starts operating on a more sophisticated level.

www.instantoffices.com