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Artificial Intelligence, once a far-off fantasy, is now reshaping how we work, live, and think about our future.
ST. LOUIS — An IT director at a local law firm deals with complex systems every day, but at her Florissant home, Syndi Sills’ concerns about technology are deeply personal.
For instance, she told 5 On Your Side she thinks Artificial Intelligence is “terrible.”
It’s more than just professional skepticism. For Syndi, she worries about what AI means for the future.
“There’s privacy concerns, there’s ethical concerns, but the one that upsets me the most is human development. I mean, why learn anything if you can just tell a machine to do it, right?” she said.
A World Economic Forum report shows 40% of employers plan to downsize within five years due to AI, displacing 92 million jobs. The report also projects the technology to generate 170 million new jobs, but more high-level education is urgently needed as most of the new jobs will require highly technical skills.
The technology is already transforming nearly every industry, according to Brian Flanagan with St. Louis-based business Perficient, a global digital consulting firm helping businesses adapt to AI. He sees AI as a tool with boundless potential.
“AI is so transformational that it makes us rethink everything,” Flanagan said. “I think it’s going to impact every single industry and every market in St. Louis.”
From finance to healthcare, AI is making waves. Flanagan’s team is working on tools like Vivi, a virtual assistant designed to help families manage routine medical care.
“Vivi is a companion agent that can coordinate appointments and notify you when prescriptions need to be renewed. It also includes biometric data,” he said.
And as AI unlocks new possibilities, it raises critical questions about ethics, inequality, and jobs.
“Having less people isn’t necessarily the solution,” Flanagan said. “Having people do more with those tools is maybe a better output because there’s so much focus on velocity. It’s more about augmentation, and that’s what we’re focused on: reskilling employees to leverage AI in the work that they do.”
Still, there are no guarantees. AI relies on human input, which means it can reflect bias. Flanagan believes we should embrace the technology while tackling its risks head-on.
“I think you probably will have less people doing the same jobs because you can do more, but there are going to be new opportunities to take that new product or information and build upon it,” Flanagan said.
For Syndi, these assurances fall flat.
“I don’t see it as a tool, honestly. I see it as a lazy way of getting things done. I think that people are just going to get lazier, and jobs are going to become more scarce,” she said.