Succeed with AI in the Workplace through Learning & Development
The pace of emerging technologies within the telecoms industry is blistering, and it can be a constant struggle for operators to keep up. Ensuring your organization delivers top product offerings while operating at scale with the latest technical advancements requires empowering and upskilling customers, internal talent, and society at large. Anything less, and you risk falling behind the curve.
If you want to learn about adapting your workforce to new technologies, keep reading. Plus, find out how Cartesian can help your organization every step along the way.
The Rise of AI in the Workplace
Artificial intelligence, especially generative AI (GenAI), will inevitably come up in any conversation about rapidly changing technologies these days, especially when it comes to AI for work.
GenAI is particularly well suited to the telecoms industry, where the challenges faced in customer engagement, network protection, and business insights lend themselves well to its judicious application.
More mundane automation and robotics serve a valuable purpose in streamlining and speeding up tasks and have enabled products such as Network as a Service (NaaS) to become practical in real world applications.
Despite the boon that AI has provided to telecom operators, the use of AI in streamlining individuals’ work has not been as widely adopted. There are several reasons for this, with concerns around security chief among them.
Empowering individuals to leverage AI in their daily work can provide huge benefits to any organization, yet it is still often avoided due to concerns overshadowing the benefits of AI:
Inability to measure the ROI: Training programs on AI or other emerging technologies is harder to measure quantitatively, as time saved is not tracked after a training.
Fear of skills leakage: Investing time in upskilling and reskilling individuals carries the perceived risk that those people will leave and take their learnings to a new organization.
Individual reluctance: There are concerns among end users that incorporating AI into their daily work could demonstrate that their job can be automated, and therefore they are reluctant to engage in AI development programs.
While most of the above concerns are valid, they certainly can be addressed by creating a welcome learning experience regarding AI and implementing new metrics for measuring the benefits of training. Accurately measuring the softer benefits of upskilling can reassure employees that using AI in the workplace is safe.
In fact, providing a roadmap for how an individual can evolve along with the pace of technology can be a massive retention tool. This approach builds faith and drives adoption, instead of instilling fear.
How Emerging Technologies Help Customers and Society
New and emerging technologies are almost always intended to make operations easier, streamline more complex tasks, and drive adoption. We saw this with cloud computing, which simplified and scaled operations by reducing the need for dedicated resources to provide a usable product. Now, that technology is ubiquitous.
Though using these products is generally simpler than what came before, knowing what products a customer might want to use, and how they will use them within their ecosystems, is a hurdle that must be surmounted. It must also be done in such a way that it will not have a direct impact on the business’s bottom line.
Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) initiatives, such as Vodafone’s vHub, act as training tools to help upskilling and reskilling. They also offer a wider contribution to society through digital skills initiatives that provide several direct and indirect benefits such as:
- Growing the pool of individuals capable and competent with these new technologies as users
- Encouraging the development of skills needed by a future workforce for those companies
- Demonstrating their societal commitment which will encourage wider adoption at lower cost and with significantly higher net benefit than traditional marketing
Offerings such as Lloyds Bank Digital Academy provide end users business-centric training courses that help everyone adopt and effectively use new technologies.
Stopping the Rot of Skills with AI
Emerging technologies, especially AI powered technologies, can become a concern for Telecoms operators if they do not have sufficient engineers and technologists to develop and maintain new products. And that’s where the benefits of employees learning new skills alongside technological advancements come in.
This is especially important now, considering the growing skills shortage in the telecom industry specifically, and the tech industry as a whole.
If the industry can’t attract more individuals to this career path, the demographics will lead to an ever-growing skills shortage. For those who choose to remain in the field, much like COBOL programmers in the late 90’s, this will be a boon.
Organizations such as UKTIN are working with schools and universities, alongside operators, to illustrate the benefits of this career path and help educate on the skills and qualifications required, especially amongst underrepresented groups, such as women.
They look to demystify the language used, as well as show how rewarding and fundamental to our modern life these roles can be. Moving away from internal jargon can help young people understand what this work offers and how they can solve problems for future generations.
Separately, hardware vendors are extremely aware of this skills gap and are using technology to help remove certain high-skill requirements from tasks such as fiber splicing, so that training can be cut from months to days and teams can get to work much more quickly to build and grow networks.
Network and software operations now focus more on first- and second-line support. They use AI to streamline processes which reduces the need for many highly skilled fourth-line engineers, who are becoming harder to find. However, as noted, it is important that we continue to bring engineering and technologists into telecoms to drive innovation in our products and optimization of networks and services.
Upskilling – A Benefit for All
It would be beneficial to us all if government and industries continue to invest in the skills of their workforce, their customers, and society at large so that the perceived threats of things like AI are transformed into opportunities and benefits.
Cartesian works with telecoms operators of every size to help deliver on these types of initiatives, and we can help you identify and realize your ambitions, too. Please contact us here to learn more about how we can support your skills and development initiatives.
