That’s the view of most of the 235 UK professionals we spoke to in June 2023 about Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI).

40% saw AI as a career opportunity, 22% believe it is a threat while, perhaps understandably, a chunky 38% are ‘not sure yet’.

Of the optimists, 45% believe AI will help them do their job better.  Faster career progression is cited by 18%.

Nearly a third of respondents see AI as some sort of Holy Grail – allowing them to do less work for the same money

In the other camp, the biggest worry is that the individual’s industry will work with little human input meaning that jobs will disappear.  Another concern expressed by 18% of those asked is ‘AI will do my job better than me’.

A quarter of those we spoke to who felt ‘threatened’ took the perhaps light-hearted view that Artificial Intelligence ‘will destroy everything, there will be nothing left’. They were joking, right? Or perhaps had just binge watched some Sci-Fi.

At SxS we like to think positive and although it is hard to predict the future when the present is changing so fast, we think AI will help us speed up and improve the quality of our work, especially with enhanced augmentation and insight data.

We estimate that roughly 80% of what we do will have an element of automation in the next three to five years.  In the longer term, it’s possible that AI could automatically create great content based on incoming data, but we feel it will still lack an understanding of the more ethereal elements of the human condition – and that is what separates the truly great work from the rest.

Simmons x Schmid spoke to 235 UK professionals in June 2023 via the Attest research platform

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