The age of AI

The Australian government is considering bringing in guardrails on how businesses can use AI. The suggested changes range from companies being required to tell you when you are engaging with AI, if they are using AI to evaluate your requests, through to banning potentially problematic AI tools that can discriminate, exploit or damage people.

Interestingly, one of the AI failures that this article in the ABC details, is companies who have used AI to screen resumes. There have been instances where the AI tool has proved to discriminate against certain ethnic groups or genders. It’s easy to think that AI tools are agnostic in that they do not contain bias and discrimination – but large language models(LLM) (the power behind AI) are trained on ‘real life’ data and processes, so if a LLM is taught to screen resumes by processes that have bias imbedded in them, then it will just repeat that bias. Like any database, it’s only as good as the data you put into it.

Remember the Google AI controversy when it would give ridiculous answers like “ you can add 1/8^th cup of non-toxic glue to pizza sauce to give it more tackiness” (so your cheese doesn’t slide off). Just to be very clear, DO NOT add glue to your food! AI is only ever as good as the LLM it is built on. 

I use AI every day in my job, and I can attest, hand on heart, AI can be really stupid. Don’t get me wrong, I love being able to ask it to help solve problems, but I often end up on the verge of an angry online fight with it when it keeps giving me particularly stupid responses.

Why are businesses so keen on AI? Do they intend to replace staff with AI?
The ROI (return on investment) for using AI is incredibly attractive to companies. For example, say they currently have a human manning a chat function on their website to help customers out. That person cannot work 24 hours a day, can’t answer more than a few chats at a time and will probably lose the will to do the work after a short period of time because it’s tedious and repetitive – so they apply for other jobs and leave. 

An AI powered chatbot can run all day, every day and learn to predict what help customers need. 

Chatbots are not new, and they can be wonderful (I am working on implementing one for people2people as we speak), but they are limited by their knowledge paths. Traditional chatbots have the paths hard coded, like if the customer says this then respond with that and so on. But they fall down when a customer wants something that is not on the hardcoded path. Think of when you log onto a site and the chatbot comes up and gives you a picklist of options and none of them are for what you are looking for. Yeah, I yell profanities at my screen too.

An AI chatbot is a next generation chatbot, it has coded paths but it also learns - the customer teaches it as they progress through the chat by giving positive or negative responses to what the chatbot is saying. This is not a bad thing at all. Over time the customer experience improves every day as the AI bot provides better responses to questions and makes less stupid suggestions. But what is important, is that you know you are dealing with AI and not a human being. This knowledge may not change a thing in the way you engage with the bot, but there may be times when you will want to chat with a human and there should be a way you can be transferred to a person or have a ticket created for a person to come back to you. 

A word about Resumes
Circling back to resume’s for a minute – yes we know when you have uploaded your resume into ChatGPT and asked it to rewrite it for you. Do we care? No.

When a people2people consultant looks at your resume, they are looking at your skills and experience. Yes, once upon a time the language and grammar were evaluated too, but now that we know that most resumes have been put together by a very large LLM, there is no point in considering that. Which is a good thing right? Focus on the skills and experience, not the sentence structure!

This means consultants will pay more attention to other factors – your willingness to engage, the way you communicate in messages, over the phone and in meetings. With resumes becoming more ‘same same’, recruiters and employers are going to trust documents less and people more. So, if a recruiter or potential employer reaches out to you remember:

• Have a professional voicemail recording
• Respond to voicemails
• If you can, be open to using text or tools like WhatsApp to communicate (it means you can respond in your time, but also engage quickly)
• Always be friendly and professional in ALL of your communications – even if you are frustrated and angry, always be polite and respectful. People have long memories.
• If you are asked to do an online interview or meeting, prepare for it by checking you have an appropriate background, your audio and video are working as expected and you are in a quiet location where you can speak freely. A train carriage is not the right place to do a job interview. Just saying.
  
  

Very few people get every job that they apply for. By all means, use AI to help set up your resume, and I would go even further and ask AI to give you common interview questions so you can prepare for interview. But don’t lie, don’t exaggerate (much, we know y’all are going to exaggerate a bit), really think about your experience and be prepared to give specific details when you are asked questions. 

Do your research on the potential employer, feel free to judge them as much as they are judging you. Be prepared. Be prepared to respond to messages, be prepared to answer detailed questions. Be prepared to nominate multiple referees who can verify the answers you give. 

And be prepared for employers who aren’t going to focus so much on how many words you can type or how many calls you can make in an hour, instead be prepared for employers who are going to ask you how you have engaged with difficult customers, how you have brought new customers to the business, and what creative strategies you have used to connect with people who don’t answer their phones. Because THOSE are the skills employers are going to be looking for in the age of AI.