How AI Can Save Jobs in the COVID-19 Economy Posted on : Aug 08 - 2020

Massive job cuts and unprecedented economic uncertainty have triggered a flight-or-fight response in businesses all over the world. Confronted with a lack of new information, company leaders are going with their gut reaction: slashing jobs to save cash and preserve options.

Their reaction is understandable. The key analytical tools they typically rely on—business intelligence systems, AI models and strategic planning forecasts—have stopped working.

Business intelligence tools look at the past, but in the current business climate, the past looks nothing like the present. Traditional AI relies on historical data, but with business conditions changing week-to-week (and sometimes day-to-day), most data is hopelessly out of date. Businesses could wait for a “new normal” to take hold and retrain the AI models, but could take years. No one has that long to wait. And annual plans and quarterly targets seem almost quaint when it’s impossible to predict what will happen in a month.

While the rush to make business decisions based on instinct may seem logical, it can be counterproductive and even dangerous. Making drastic across-the-board cuts in budget and jobs amounts to wielding a meat cleaver rather than a scalpel. You have no idea whether you’re cutting fat or muscle. And rather than preserving options, big cuts often reduce options when companies try to move forward.

What leaders need is an analytical tool to help them consider many possibilities quickly, execute a strategy while preserving options and react to change based on timely feedback. Those things are impossible for a person to accomplish on their own. The right tool for the job, in this case, is a new type of AI that blends augmented analytics and human domain knowledge. View More