For many years, AI and automation have always been met with suspicions and fears of unemployment. Despite the many benefits that technology readily offers, there were a lot of hesitations from many people that cannot easily accept the idea of replacing people with machinery and jobs with software applications.
However, the resistance to technology has slowly been swept away as COVID-19 crisis caused many to stop business operations and were forced to stay at home. As a survival response, many entrepreneurs began exploring the possibilities of conducting business digitally; and eventually learning that the internet is already in abundance of solutions that can help you earn money.
Automation technologies are seeing their business adoption exponentially accelerate as the increase of eCommerce stores led to a better acceptance of the integration of technology in business. This is a great opportunity to create more technological solutions that can cater to the needs of growing new eCommerce managers.
But now another threat arises: technology will never stop evolving, so will eCommerce jobs also be eventually replaced?
5 Skills AI Does not Have
There are especially five human abilities that cannot be replaced by Artificial Intelligence and which human beings present an insurmountable advantage today. They are leadership, creativity, innovation, improvisation, and empathy:
Leadership
It is undeniable that AI will replace workers in basic tasks of economic-financial, logistics and material management, human resources, and projects, but people have more advanced management capabilities that AI can’t replace. The following two skills play a key role:
First is the ability to manage the growth of human groups. This is the ability to help members of the organization develop their skills and grow professionally through our innate leadership ability to set goals, motivate, lead by example, evaluate, delegate, and pass on experience.
Secondly, there is also the capacity to conduct the rehabilitation administration of the organizational stakeholders when they face issues resulting from interpersonal connections or other psychological causes, which is founded on the abilities of empathy, coaching, compassion, and security.
Creativity
AI will never be able to substitute the ambition, discovery, and initial proposition of innovative and advanced designs, which must be implemented not just to the person as a visionary, as well as to the capacity to move out collective knowledge governance focused on advancement, enabling the introduction of various experience and intelligence. It is much harder to match the capacity to execute fresh concepts in the company, to communicate in an appealing manner, to persuade and get the company to work easily to adopt creative ideas.
Of course, Artificial Intelligence has shown that it can help generate new creations like in photo editing, learning from the history of previous proposals. However, the vast majority of the results will not have the level of true creation or product innovation, so a long process of months of training and human review of the results will be necessary to obtain true productivity.
Innovation
You’ll be developing innovative items and come up with notions that don’t appear if you have strong creativity and a creative streak. Of course, when combined with Artificial Intelligence, robots may collect data and utilize the results to create music, art, cuisine, and other things. However, they will never be able to match human ingenuity.
The great news is how you can constantly stay ahead of the herd, especially robots if you use your imagination. Your talents and skills are in good hands, even if you have a talent for writing or a flair for producing new items.
Improvisation
Having an improvisation skill means that you can do something that is not planned beforehand. This is a skill that is important to be able to react to sudden instances such as emergencies or changes in the environment/situation.
Improvisation is something that AI cannot have. Although they can respond to specific situations based on how they were developed, they cannot do things differently other than their programmed rules.
Empathy
AI can easily take over basic verbal and visual communication services, such as digital assistant-based customer service. However, our ability to empathize with the client and to carry out non-verbal communication based on emotions gives us an advantage that can never be replaced by Artificial Intelligence. These qualities can make the difference between a misunderstood and dissatisfied customer versus an understood and therefore loyal customer.
Jobs that AI can Never Replace
We are now in the throes of a revolutionary upheaval that the sharpest specialists are having difficulty predicting how it will develop over the coming few years. Many occupations will be done by automation and machines in the coming years, beginning with self-driving cars, coaches, and lorries in the transport industry.
What options do we have? These are just a few of the occupations that Artificial Intelligence will almost certainly be unable to supplant in the following decades.
1. Managerial Positions
As mentioned, AI cannot lead. Although an AI can be taught how to deal with things routinely based on its program rules, it cannot decide on behalf of a company. AI cannot talk and negotiate with investors, it cannot employ people for specific positions, and most of all, it cannot bring people together to work for a specific cause. Technology is just a tool to aid a company in realizing its success.
Does this mean that AI cannot replace any leadership position?
Replace–maybe not. But it can surely cause unemployment of some leaders in specific positions. In a production-type profession for example, once production operators are replaced with machines, there will be no need for these machines to be told what to do by a supervisor. Instead, engineers and technicians will be sent to the post to maintain the condition of these machines.
So far, there are no worries about these fears in eCommerce. ECommerce businesses definitely need leaders and people who can make decisions in order to keep it going.
2. Product photography
While AI can replace tasks that come with photography like manual background removal and retouching, it can never replace the photography task itself. Product photography has always been a human task.
In eCommerce, a photographer’s creativity and ideas are needed to take images to a whole new different level. It is all up to a photographer’s expertise to take product images that are pleasing to the human’s eyes and include elements that will present a product effectively.
3. Customer support
It is almost difficult for companies to be linked to their consumers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, irrespective of size, sector, or the efficiency of their consumer care staff. Companies frequently spend an enormous deal of time managing numerous channels of communication while still failing to stay up with customers, clientele, and their needs, whether providing ongoing customer service for current customers or recruiting new prospects.
Customer support solutions and sales techniques are frequently the easiest to assess, enhance, and update. Furthermore, there are currently a plethora of firms that provide services to assist you in automating these important business sectors. They cannot, however, assist you whether you have not properly examined whatever you wish to accomplish.
Employing AI for customer care streamlines internal procedures and improves outcomes. Even if convenience and efficiency are the goals, adopting chatbots and integrating digital solutions to improve customer connections takes time, dedication, and extensive expertise.
4. Copywriting
The fact that AI is unable to presently relate with humans in the very same manner in which we can prevent it from assuming the work of the copywriter. Artificial Intelligence could be able to imitate compassion to some level. Technology, on the other hand, can only take us so far.
Due to one matter: data, AI could make copywriters’ work simpler. AI may detect patterns and specific phrases that may elicit a favorable reaction, making it easy to split-test your copy to determine which one performs better. Nevertheless, it’ll be the copywriter’s responsibility to analyze and assess the facts in order to determine how the company will be marketed. Even though AI becomes a reality, copywriting will remain among the most crucial professions in a company. Rather, AI ought to be ready to aid you in elevating your text, rather than working against you!
5. Social Media Management
Human ingenuity, which is fuelled by passion, creativity, as well as other non-objective variables, is still unaffected by AI. Writing creative posts on social media to encourage engagements and devising strategies that will increase organic and relevant following is something an AI can’t do. More so, AI can’t create for itself a post to showcase its talent nor have the skills to entertain people. Entertainment requires improvisation to … a quick reaction to a community’s engagements.
Collaboration, not Competition
Who is better, humans or AI? This question will always pop up whenever we try to compare both. But shouldn’t the mindset be more about how these two can work together to produce greater results?
AI technology will augment rather than replace our abilities. Most AI systems are intended to be exceptionally effective at addressing a single problem within the framework of a given information system. Human ingenuity, understanding, and application of knowledge, on the other hand, are essential for AI to function.
We humans can develop and use AI as tools to manage our workflows and tasks easier. Although AI does replace some eCommerce tasks,we can look at it as an opportunity to take care and improve the other areas of our business. By using our innate skills as humans to improvise and devise new ideas, we can surely function better and provide more solutions for our clients and customers.
About the Author:
Miguel Davao is a professional violinist and writes program notes for certain symphony orchestras and is a teacher at a local university in the Philippines. He particularly writes content on eCommerce, design, photo editing tools and content writing tips.
Currently, he works as a full-time writer at Removal.AI – fast growing start-up that offers image processing and AI background removal for ecommerce, web and app development and marketing automation.