The government and private sector must work together to adopt to the changes brought by artificial intelligence (AI), according to Sanjay Sarma, president and dean of the Asia School of Business in Malaysia.
A professor in the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a leading authority in AI, Internet of Things, and education, Sarma said AI is fast redefining the process of businesses that industries like business process outsourcing will need to quickly adapt into the changes that AI brings.
Sarma said AI could completely transform how businesses are done as fast as two years from now.
“The reason is that these technologies, these transformer technologies… there are now lots of companies working in it. And there’s millions, hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on it,” he said.
“In the Philippines, AI is going to replace jobs. So, let’s accept that. And the Philippines should become the country that leads the world in how to use AI, in call centers. It will put some people out of work, but at least you define the rules of how it works,” Sarma added.
Sarma said as a result, the labor force needs to move up the value chain of services. AI would require more investments in science and technology, engineering and mathematics education of current and future employees.
Sarma said as for the local service industry, workers will have to do the things that technology cannot.
“GPT cannot negotiate with you. GPT can’t do any planning. GPT can’t really do dispute resolution. GPT can’t calm an angry customer. So you have to really figure out what the technology can do and what humans can do, that the technology can’t. And you’re to develop human capital in those directions,” he said, referring to Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer., an AI-powered language model.
Sarma said in the Philippines, “it has to be a national effort.”
“The government needs to be cognizant, that this is a epic moment. This is technology change, just like climate change,” he said.
