AI skills will soon be as necessary for job seekers as Microsoft Word. Who will be left behind?

Artificial intelligence (AI) skills will soon be as essential as knowing how to use Microsoft Word, an expert has said – and those who fail to upskill could be “left behind”.

In July, some 28,000 UK job listings required AI skills. According to job platform Adzuna, third of these were positions outside of the tech industry. 

The trend is likely to continue, said professor Andrew Rogoyski, of the Surrey Institute for People-Centred Artificial Intelligence. Most desk jobs will probably soon require AI-competence.

“Employers ask for familiarity with Microsoft Word and Excel and those kinds of skills. which are routine in any office-based job. This is a natural extension of that,” he told the Big Issue. “Knowing how to use them effectively is just very rapidly becoming a sort of everyday skill.”

Learning these skills won’t be a “huge challenge” for most people, he added, but it will likely deepen the divide between people with digital access and people without it.

“I’ve heard the saying: ‘You won’t lose your job to AI, you’ll lose your job to human who’s being supported by using AI,’” he said.

“And I think that’s probably true. If you’re applying for a job, the person who’s got AI skills is likely going to score higher than the person who hasn’t.”

The Oxford Internet Institute analysed one million jobs, and found that some job sectors value “AI expertise even more than traditional academic credentials”.

Roughly 10 million people in the UK can’t access or use digital technology – which has become the primary platform for recruiting staff across nearly every sector – previous Lloyds Bank research has shown.

What will artificial intelligence (AI) mean for the workplace?

Artificial intelligence is transforming the workplace – and the UK is at a “sliding doors moment”.

That was the warning issued by Institute for Public Policy Research earlier this year, as they published research envisaging a “job apocalypse” without significant government intervention. In the “worst case scenario,” 7.9 million jobs could be lost, their analysis showed, with no GDP gains. In the best-case scenario, no jobs are lost, and there is a 13% increase in GDP.

The IPPR called for encourage job-augmentation over full displacement, and to regulate areas like health to ensure “human responsibility of key issues.”

Such job-augmentation can be positive, said Rogoyski – as “large-language models like ChatGPT are now very good at writing.” Structuring and summarisation, for example, are strong points.

But human oversight is also very necessary. Without it, so-called efficiency gains can end up backfiring.

“Technologies designed to increase efficiency can often lead to adverse outcomes,” Rogoyski warned. “Take email, for example. How many people are completely overloaded by their email inbox? You know, when email was first brought to everyone, I thought, ‘Great, I don’t have to write those physical memos anymore.’ Little did we realise that we will become slaves to it, and it hasn’t. It hasn’t saved work. It’s created work.”

Sometimes, the adoption of AI creates ‘process collapse’. People apply for jobs using AI-written applications, then employers screen these applications with an AI-supported firewall.

This creates a “war of capabilities” which “doesn’t help employer or potential employee, and only succeeds in adding complexity while driving up everyone’s computer bills”.

“We lose sight of something that should be an inherently human process, for humans and by humans,” Rogoyski said. “We ought to be a bit more thoughtful about how we use and apply automation technologies.”

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