A.I. is changing industries. Resistance is futile.

Is artificial intelligence going to replace your job or business? If you don’t pivot now, A.I. will absolutely change your industry and before long could render your job and business obsolete.

Before we get into that though, let me explain a little more about how A.I. works. Artificial intelligence acts as a glorified button pusher. Under this condition it pulls that lever and afterwards takes these steps to gauge success. Conceptually, it’s not that complicated. The real power behind A.I. comes when you give it more “levers” to play with.

Let’s take a car as an example. What levers could we give an A.I. control of while driving? We could let it accelerate, break, steer left, steer right, etc.

The concept of a lever expands to businesses as well. Unfortunately in business, those levers replace people (and sometimes entire businesses or industries).

Deep-fried automation.

Story time. Before I was the technology guru we all know and love, I managed a quick server burger restaurant in the frigid North. Fun fact about quick serve: you live and die by your fryer operator. Fries take 3 minutes to cook. They’re only good for 5 minutes. Cook too many and you’re wasting money. It takes a talented individual to keep that fryer working efficiently.

And that individual is a lever operator. The levers they manipulate include: when to cook fries, how much to cook, how far to prep ahead.

Even as we speak, technology companies are looking to replace this pivotal role with artificial intelligence. In 2019 McDonalds started testing automated fryers with the goal of increasing product quality and speed of delivery while also decreasing labor costs. It won’t be long before your entire dining experience is automated!

Skilled service won’t survive.

That last example was a pretty clear example of A.I. replacing humans in the workforce, but a fryer operator is a low skill job. Obviously artificial intelligence can’t replace more skilled, service based businesses. Right?

Wrong. Jobs once thought safe are quickly being overtaken by technology.

Let’s take another career field we’re pretty familiar with: digital marketing. A skilled digital marketing specialist can net you massive returns on your marketing investments. They know the perfect time to run your ads, they know the exact audience you need to reach, and they know just the perfect mix of budget and pacing to keep your business growing. And A.I. is better at it.

When to run ads, which ads to run, how much money to spend on ad placement, where to place ads, how to gauge campaign success. The levers are more sophisticated, but they are levers nonetheless, and the technology to replace the human pulling them is already here. Whether it’s generating copy, scaling your audience, creating e-blasts, or simply managing ad budget, A.I. has found its way into all facets of this service-based business. One local marketing firm has even gone so far as to create a marketing A.I. that controls the entire process! Their team simply guides the machine, feeding it data on an as-needed basis.

It’s coming for you too, creatives.

Well, things are looking bleak, but luckily technology has nothing on the creative works. Or does it?

Before you go dusting off that old art degree, know that even more artistic-inclined fields are seeing artificial intelligence quickly encroach. Technology companies are teaching A.I. powered chatbots to adopt unique personalities and adapt their conversation to the tone and mood of the user. Imagine if they turned this technology towards the field of film script generation.

Oh sorry, disregard, that’s already being done. And here’s an A.I. painting (with its creation selling for more than $400,000). And here’s another A.I. composing music.

Creative works such as design and artistry are more difficult for an A.I. to reproduce, but they are not impossible to reproduce. The data channels are different, but not immeasurable. Instead of gauging financial success, we’re looking at user satisfaction.

A.I. is coming for your jobs too, creatives.

So what do you do?

Well, that was bleak. The good news is, there’s something you can do. You simply need to pivot. Don’t be the business that is made redundant by technology. Become the business that provides the technology. Become a technology provider. Get in contact today to get started.