AI Is Changing How Employees Learn Their Jobs – Yahoo News Singapore

With all the hype around AI taking jobs, whenever I’m working with a C-Suite executive or CX leader, I ask: “Will AI eventually make the customer service agent obsolete?”

The short answer is always, “No.”

Some leaders tell me they aren’t hiring as many people as they did in the past, but nobody is telling me humans are going away. As soon as an issue becomes complicated, sensitive or unusual, or the customer is simply frustrated with AI, a human still needs to be available. And let me add, it should be easy to reach one.

Rachel Orston is the chief customer officer at Instructure, the company behind the Canvas learning management platform. As we discussed how companies prepare employees for this new world of work, she made an interesting and provocative comment. She said, “I’m not even sure that we’re training the wrong skills. I’m not sure we’re training at all.”

Her point was that much of what companies call training is just information transfer. Watch a presentation, learn about the product, study the policies, take a quiz and then go to work.

That may have worked well when employees handled easier issues while gaining the experience they needed to eventually handle more difficult problems and projects.

But AI is changing that.

AI Is Automating the Training Ground

Consider how most people traditionally learned their jobs. They were onboarded, trained and started with easier tasks. They answered basic questions. They handled common problems. They made small decisions. Sometimes they made mistakes and then learned from those mistakes. That gave them confidence, and eventually they became capable of handling more complicated situations.

That traditional on-ramp gave employees the opportunity to learn the basics before moving on to bigger and more important parts of the job. As Orston put it, “We didn’t just automate the easy work with AI. We’ve automated the on-ramp.”

This potentially creates a problem. The employee may be new, but the problems they’re handed are not. The problems, issues and questions are more advanced than what a new employee would typically start with. In effect, we’re asking less experienced employees to handle the situations that technology can’t handle. Employees are thrown into situations that may require the skills that used to take months or even years of experience and training to develop.

Experience Has to Come from Somewhere

This doesn’t mean companies should stop using AI for simple tasks. Quite the opposite. If AI can answer a simple question faster and more accurately, use it. But leaders must recognize what is being lost in the area of employee development.

Those simple interactions were more than just work. They were practice and the foundation for handling bigger issues and responsibilities.

The answer is to give employees time to master the basics. Let them do what you want AI to do first so they can get good at the basics before they advance to the next level.

When they are ready, move employees to advanced training. Orston says this should look less like a classroom and more like the real world. Simulations and role-plays become the answer to learning how to deal with difficult issues and conversations. Let them use their judgment to make decisions and explain why they made them. Coach them on what they might do differently next time.

Then do it again … and again. That’s how on-the-job experience can be built in an era of AI and automation where people aren’t needed in those basic steps.

Final Words

AI is changing the work employees do, so companies must also change how they train and prepare employees.

If AI effectively handles simple, routine and repetitive tasks, employees will be expected to step in and handle what AI can’t. To be effective, they have to understand what AI can and can’t do. They must be proficient at that before moving on to the higher-level issues that require greater skill, empathy and judgment.

AI may eliminate parts of the traditional employee onboarding process, but we can’t eliminate the experience employees need for what comes next.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com