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AI has made significant strides in a few years, and the popularity of tools like ChatGPT has familiarized us with some of the most common content generation use cases of AI. However, people are getting creative with the ways they use AI, and it turns out there are some surprising ways we can use it to bolster our careers, from the job search to improving performance to career planning and progression.
And while some people have expressed fear over AI replacing their jobs, most are finding that AI’s prowess lies in supporting rather than replacing human work. In fact, SME IT professionals’ worries over AI threatening their job stability have decreased significantly from Q1 to Q3 this year.
This blog will cover some of the surprising ways AI can help with your work experience, as well as some of the areas where AI falls short, proving that it’s a great helper, but a far cry from taking over.
1. Sci-Fi-Esque Information Access
It’s no surprise that AI has made information more accessible. However, the sheer speed of AI’s ability to retrieve information — and AI’s very human-sounding, conversational delivery — has brought AI eerily close to many sci-fi predictions of the 20th century.
The result is that people can now ask AI tools conversationally phrased questions and get clear, direct answers to them in real time.
Not only is this the case with generative AI tools like ChatGPT, but new features in search tools like Google similarly answer search questions directly with AI-generated answers. This way, users get immediate answers to their questions without having to comb the search results themselves.
In the workplace, this quick access to information makes learning and discovery faster and more streamlined. The result is better productivity, faster problem-solving, and more informed decision making. This means employees can focus more on high-value work, ultimately leading to better job performance and career advancement.
2. Bridged Language Gaps
AI’s recent leaps in natural language processing (NLP) have made conversational, native-sounding language accessible to non-native speakers. This has opened the door to more career opportunities for more people — especially when it comes to global and remote work.
While employees will still need to speak the main language of their workplace, tools like ChatGPT can act as an assistant and proofreader to help with their professional writing. This can help with job applications as well as performance in the workplace, making tasks like email-writing or documentation tasks faster, easier, and more clear.
3. Enhanced Human Creativity
AI has come with a lot of worry around replacing human ingenuity. This has been particularly salient in some creative fields. The writer’s strike in Hollywood was a notable and high-visibility example of the issue.
While the question of AI’s role in creative pursuits is still widely debated, it seems that many overlook AI’s ability to enhance human creativity. Generative AI’s conversational nature and ability to return content and ideas quickly makes it a great sounding board, brainstorming partner, and creativity prompter.
Employees looking to flesh out ideas, find holes in theories, or simply get their thoughts flowing should practice their AI prompting skills. With the right input, AI can become a valuable ideation partner and uplift people in their roles.
4. Learning Aid
Because AI can quickly parse and synthesize information, it’s a great learning tool. Employees can harness these capabilities to learn new tasks at work, to explore new fields, and even as a study aid when it comes to earning new certifications or degrees. This can make new job pathways more accessible and help employees learn new tasks and roles more quickly.
Note: Pro tip: Try having ChatGPT walk you through a problem! Instead of just asking what the answer is, try a prompt like “How would you solve this problem? Walk me through the steps.”
5. Career Growth Assistant
When applied to career paths and opportunities, AI’s ability to parse and synthesize data makes it a great career coach. It can help people understand what career paths are available to them given their role and background, and it can help them map out the steps to get there. This includes identifying relevant courses, certifications, or degrees that would help people stand out as job candidates.
What’s more, generative AI’s ability to write content makes it a helping hand when it comes to resume building and cover letter writing. This can be especially helpful for those in non-writing roles that aren’t comfortable with professional writing.
The Caveats (3 Reasons AI Isn’t Going to Replace Us)
The strides we’ve made with AI are large, but so are the caveats surrounding them. While AI plays a great supporting role in the workplace, there are some important reasons that it doesn’t function on its own and shouldn’t be trusted without human oversight.
1. The information isn’t always accurate.
A lot of AI-generated content is accurate and informative. However, it isn’t guaranteed to be. AI has been known to “hallucinate,” or make up things that aren’t true (like advising people to eat rocks and put glue on pizza). For those using AI at work, this could translate to anything from AI making up job experiences on your resume to writing inaccurate code to teaching you the wrong information for a course.
While these examples are fairly harmless, AI mistakes can do real harm, and not checking AI-generated content for accuracy can be dangerous. And while AI gets a lot right, it still doesn’t take much to break it. Case in point: just ask it to draw you a picture.
The takeaway: always do your due diligence and check important AI-generated information instead of taking it at face value.
2. Its generated content is still surface-level.
If you’ve ever seen AI try to generate an image of a person eating, you know that the devil’s in the details when it comes to generative AI. It gets the gist of things, but if you ask it to get specific — whether in terms of strategy, imagery, code, or other areas — it often comes up short. AI-generated content is great for high-level work, but it often can’t get deep enough to create meaningful, in-depth content. That’s still up to us.
3. It raises important security questions.
Generative AI raises questions around data security and privacy. Like any software, AI tools can be targets for malicious attacks. There have already been reported attacks on generative AI tools, including Cutout and ChatGPT. Through input and output, AI tools collect large amounts of potentially sensitive information, from company data to proprietary code — any of which could be compromised in an attack.
61% of SME IT professionals say that AI is outpacing their organization’s ability to protect against threats.
JumpCloud 2024 SME IT Trends Report
It’s important to ensure you can trust the tools you and your team work with. Before you approve an AI tool for company use, make sure you understand what data it stores, how it protects that data, and how it secures itself against attack.
To learn more, check out our blog: 3 Security Implications of ChatGPT and Other AI Content-Generation Tools.
Learn How SMEs Are Using AI
With so many helpful use cases, it makes sense that 90% of small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are using or plan to use AI. To learn how they’re approaching AI and how IT professionals see it affecting their jobs and organizations, download the free report: How Are SME IT Professionals Navigating AI?
