UAE: Embrace AI or be replaced, experts warn employees
Are you worried that your job might become automated one day and you might be asked to leave the company? Employees need to train themselves on technical skills before they become redundant at their companies, industry executives warned on Wednesday.
"Junior level employees need to start training themselves in technical skills. Instead of your senior coming and telling you that this process can be automated, if you are not thinking ahead of time, you will be replaced by the year. We need to train and upskill our juniors on technical skills," said Ashok Mehngi, group financial controller, NMC Healthcare.
"Mid-level staff need to work not only on technical skills but also on how to collaborate with other departments. Finance can no more be a single department which will work in silos, but work collaboratively with other departments, and middle-level managers need to learn it," he added while speaking during a panel discussion at the New Age Finance and Accounting Summit organized by Khaleej Times on Wednesday.
Senior employees need both technical and people management skills
With regard to senior level employees, he added that strategic thinking alone is not going to serve the purpose without them also being enabled with AI.
"We're increasingly focusing on improvement. The audit closing is no more a monthly thing, it might become a bi-monthly exercise because we don't want wait for month-end to see the results and then take action. The finance team needs to support everybody in such a way that, going forward, this bi-monthly reporting will happen, and people start making the decision at a faster pace," he said.
He stressed on learning both technical and people management skills.
"We need both of them even at the senior level. They need to learn technical skills, because, when my juniors or mid-level team members provide me with some reports, if I do not understand how these reports are made, I will not be able to make those decisions. So technical skills are required not only at a junior level but also at a senior level. It's high time firms started investing in technology and people, because going forward, nobody will accept it. It's important to have people and technical skills, both,' he said during the panel discussion, which was moderated by Anand Soni, group CFO and strategic finance and business transformation leader and corporate trainer.
Sireesha Venkata, Group CFO of BPG Group, and Ramkumar Balasubramaniam, CFO of Barclays, also took part in the panel discussion.
Quit worrying about your job, embrace AI
Anshu Sharma Raja, banking CIO and global technology leader, said finance professionals should embrace new technologies instead of worrying about artificial intelligence (AI) taking away their jobs.
"We are in the new wave of AI revolution. Digital transformation is one thing, but this AI wave is a whole new thing and that is truly happening. I can't imagine anybody not using ChatGPT and so on. People like me have stopped using Google and now go to ChatGPT and other platforms. It has democratized that technology and it is in the hands of every single one of us, from CEOs to the junior-most guy. It is not about how I can save my job, but how I can leverage that technology so that I can do my job in a more efficient, effortless way to minimize errors," said Raja.
She noted that be it small or big companies, they are integrating ChatGPT and other AI capabilities into their platform.
"None of our jobs will be secure in the current avatar when you have driverless cars and so on. Those things are a reality, not some sci-fi thing that's going to happen in 50 years' time. People are questioning the value of education and degrees," she said during the panel discussion, adding that a lot of times finance teams and the CFOs keep themselves at arm's length from technology and think of themselves as users of a technology platform that a tech team is providing.
"I would encourage everybody to change that narrative. Get in the conversation, start driving requirements upfront and start co-creating based on what's available today. Ask your CIOs how to embrace this technology rather than getting worried about the jobs being taken away," she added.
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