Business leaders expect automation and artificial intelligence to transform, if not totally take over, their workforce in the coming years—and Mastercard is training workers who are caught in the crosshairs of the AI revolution.
The credit card company’s executive vice president of business and insights, Mohamed Abdelsadek, said that Mastercard already offers three types of AI training to its workforce: a broad foundational training, tailored job-specific offerings, and a reskilling program.
In a wide-ranging discussion about building trust in the age of AI during Fortune's Brainstorm AI conference this week, Abdelsadek stressed the importance of investing in re-skilling for internal talent whose work could otherwise become obsolete. Organizations could risk losing a great colleague with years of institutional knowledge—or they could just prepare that person to move around within the company.
“It’s a lot more cost effective to reskill than to find somebody new,” he said. In the near term, the bosses are banking on the idea that humans who use AI will be better employees than humans who don’t.
Jack Azagury, chief of consulting at Accenture, added that educating a workforce on how to use AI requires explaining how it works. He suggested companies consider trainings “not just on how to use AI, but on the underlying architecture of the technology.” (Disclosure: Accenture is a sponsor of Brainstorm AI)
That’s especially key so workers know what data a particular model they’re using is trained on in order to better tailor their prompts to the system, he said.
“People that are well trained on what data is in the model will perform a lot better,” he said.
For companies wondering who in their workforce will be affected, ServiceNow Chief Customer Officer Chris Bedi said to consider the role of an analyst: scanning large sets of data to identify trends.
“The things we value in an analyst are all things AI is great at,” Bedi said. As a result, he sees the role of a human analyst will become about asking the right question of an AI system.
Suresh Venkatarayalu, CTO and President of the Connected Enterprise business at Honeywell, already sees AI switching from assisted to autonomous in the aerospace industry. But making sure workers trust the technology remains crucial: that’s why it uses a three-step process to take AI applications from AI-assisted to AI-led to autonomous.
“So for us, the trustworthiness is, are you going to be linking this to a mission critical, safety critical system that I can assure?” he said.
