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Last month, JPMorgan Chase announced that all its new hires would receive training in the use of artificial intelligence — promising that such a move would help staff to eliminate repetitive “no joy work” and boost productivity and revenues.

“This year, everyone coming in here will have prompt engineering training to get them ready for the AI of the future,” said Mary Erdoes, chief executive of the US bank’s Asset and Wealth Management business.

She was referring to the process of writing the most effective text ‘prompts’, which are required to generate the desired response from an AI application. And Erdoes is not the only business leader to see this need. Prompt engineering is emerging as one of the in-demand skills in workplaces where AI is taking over and automating tasks, or acting as an aid to workers — for example, through chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

In governments, globally, productivity improvements from generative AI could be worth $1.75tn annually by 2033, according to Marc Warner, co-founder and chief executive of Faculty, a London-based company providing AI software, consulting and services.

But reaping these benefits will require careful investment in retraining for an AI world.

“It’s not AI that will replace humans, it’s humans who can work with it [who] will replace [those] who can’t,” says Khariton Matveev, a tech entrepreneur. His advice is: “View AI as a co-worker, don’t avoid it, but look more for cases of implementation in your field.”

According to one study , nearly a fifth of US workers could have at least 50 per cent of their tasks affected by the introduction of large language models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4. Matveev believes this AI adoption will be more about “partially replacing some job elements than entirely replacing professions”. He suggests that information-processing jobs — such as translator, researcher, or designer — are at higher risk than professions requiring physical strength.In preparation for the new technology, he recommends that workers complete […]

Retraining workers for the AI world