This post was originally published on this site.
KALAMAZOO, Mich. — At 48 years-old with grey hair, Mark Keady might not be what you would expect to see for an artificial intelligence expert. However, he is rapidly becoming one.
“I am finding out more and more in the rooms that I go into, the webinars I attend, I seem to be a lot further ahead than some other people,” said Keady, the Creative Marketing Coordinator for WSI, a Kalamazoo based staffing company that helps employers find employees.
Keady has taken online courses and is working on a degree, so education is certainly apart of developing his artificial intelligence skills.
However, in many ways he is self-taught, doing a lot of online tinkering, to learn about AI.
“Electricity, the internet, AI. I think these are the big three over the last hundred years. These are the three most important inventions,” Keady said.
New Jersey based company Pearson, a lifelong learning company, stated artificial intelligence could add 44,000 jobs to Michigan’s economy with in three years.
According to the University of Maryland, and the job-tracking firm ‘LinkUp,” positions in AI based fields in the United States jumped 68% since 2022. During that same time period, overall job openings dropped 17%.
“AI is everywhere already. So there is not much reason you should fear it. The question is what are you going to do about it,” Dr. Kuanchin Chen, director of the Center for Business Analytics at Western Michigan University, said.
“It took a telephone 75 years to reach 100 million people. It took cell phones 16 years to reach that same number of people,” Chen added. “Now if we talk about Chat GPT, it took them two months to reach the same number of people.”
Mark Keady uses Chat GPT at WSI, setting up different programs to benefit the company.
One helps the sales team by setting up talking to client scenarios, simulating questions they might have, while another produced AI-generated responses to company reviews.
Keady argues in many cases, people should not fear losing their job to AI. They should fear losing their job to another person who better understands AI.
“You have both been doing the same job, side by side for 25 years. Maybe this person retires. Somebody new comes in who has amazing AI skills, and now what used to take two people, the technology can kind of do the work of both people,” Keady said.