AGI: Enough with the hype; let’s ask the important questions
Today’s horse-race coverage of artificial general intelligence fails to consider its implications.
Discover industry-specific solutions and expertise.
Solve your toughest A&D challenges with Belcan.
Ignite peak performance and efficiency in your business.
Reimagine your manufacturing competitive advantage.
Accelerate growth with customer-focused solutions.
Our data and AI solutions align with your business outcomes and create impactful results.
Personalize learning experiences with education tech and IT solutions—and make learners feel valued.
Create strategies for product, service and process innovation that deliver new growth.
Meet customer demands for a digital, personalized online insurance experience—while reducing risk.
Digitally transform to empower a more intelligent, agile and high-performing enterprise.
Make business decisions based on real-time contextual data with our digital solutions.
Stay ahead of the competition with the latest tech like IoT, machine learning and blockchain.
Deep industry expertise to propel your business into the future.
Explore Belcan’s flexible, custom-tailored solutions.
Put AI to work and turn opportunity into value.
Accelerate time to value for industrial edge AI.
Maintain high integrity across the AI lifecycle.
Realize the next frontier of enterprise performance.
Enhance operations, boost efficiency, remove technical debt and modernize apps for the future.
Operate with insight and speed—using AI-powered processes that supercharge performance.
Boost operational efficiency, optimize costs and speed product development.
Reimagine the customer experience, attract and retain top talent, and win in the digital economy.
Sense change, optimize operations and mitigate risk with data-driven insights at quantum speed.
Enable a more secure and value-centered business with proven next-gen solutions.
AI insights to inspire enterprise transformation.
Understand and anticipate the needs of AI-empowered customers.
Invest in people to unlock the power of AI.
Bridge the gap between strong AI leadership and business readiness.
Explore the future of business with our Gen AI insights.
Explore the top focus areas that are important to Cognizant and our clients.
Dive into our forward-thinking research and uncover new tech and industry trends.
Check out our other insights and research—and the experts behind them.
Explore how our expertise can help you sense opportunities sooner and outpace change.
Discover industry-specific solutions and expertise.
Solve your toughest A&D challenges with Belcan.
Ignite peak performance and efficiency in your business.
Reimagine your manufacturing competitive advantage.
Accelerate growth with customer-focused solutions.
Our data and AI solutions align with your business outcomes and create impactful results.
Personalize learning experiences with education tech and IT solutions—and make learners feel valued.
Create strategies for product, service and process innovation that deliver new growth.
Meet customer demands for a digital, personalized online insurance experience—while reducing risk.
Digitally transform to empower a more intelligent, agile and high-performing enterprise.
Make business decisions based on real-time contextual data with our digital solutions.
Stay ahead of the competition with the latest tech like IoT, machine learning and blockchain.
Deep industry expertise to propel your business into the future.
Explore Belcan’s flexible, custom-tailored solutions.
Put AI to work and turn opportunity into value.
Accelerate time to value for industrial edge AI.
Maintain high integrity across the AI lifecycle.
Realize the next frontier of enterprise performance.
Enhance operations, boost efficiency, remove technical debt and modernize apps for the future.
Operate with insight and speed—using AI-powered processes that supercharge performance.
Turn big visions into practical realities with expertise that takes you further.
Boost operational efficiency, optimize costs and speed product development.
Reimagine the customer experience, attract and retain top talent, and win in the digital economy.
Sense change, optimize operations and mitigate risk with data-driven insights at quantum speed.
Enable a more secure and value-centered business with proven next-gen solutions.
Turn sustainability commitments into achievable milestones.
AI insights to inspire enterprise transformation.
Understand and anticipate the needs of AI-empowered customers.
Invest in people to unlock the power of AI.
Bridge the gap between strong AI leadership and business readiness.
Explore the future of business with our Gen AI insights.
Keep up with the trends shaping the future of business—and stay ahead in a fast-changing world.
Explore the top focus areas that are important to Cognizant and our clients.
Dive into our forward-thinking research and uncover new tech and industry trends.
Check out our other insights and research—and the experts behind them.
Explore how our expertise can help you sense opportunities sooner and outpace change.
January 11, 2024
As gen AI moves into the mainstream, this powerful technology could distribute productivity gains across social sectors and act as a balance wheel for society.
Over the past two and a half centuries, the world has experienced five technological revolutions, according to economic historian Carlota Perez. Each revolution occurs about every half century, brings together multiple interrelated technologies and produces profound socio-economic shifts. In the early stages of these revolutions, notes Perez, people often fear that skills, jobs and industries will be upended—and for good reason.
Given this long historical pattern, will generative AI, with capabilities so different from any of its predecessor technologies, follow the same trajectory? Will its benefits flow mostly to the economically privileged who already have full access to and familiarity with digital technologies?
As generative AI begins to move into the mainstream in 2024, I believe this technology could break that trend and become an equalizer for society broadly.
Here are a few reasons why. To begin, generative AI has qualities that depart from prior technology waves, such as its outsized productivity power. In partnership with Oxford Economics, Cognizant analyzed the economic impact of generative AI in the US and forecasts this technology could add as much as $1 trillion to US GDP and boost worker productivity by 10% and total factor productivity by 3.5% by 2032. Increasing the economic pie is broadly viewed as a key route to prosperity for all.
Generative AI is also simple to use. In the past, people needed to know a programming language to efficiently use AI. No longer. Knowledge of a natural language is now sufficient to use some of the most powerful AI tools available. As AI expert Andrej Karpathy observed, “the hottest new programming language is English.” Therefore, solving problems using AI has become much easier and more broadly accessible, aided also by the ability to use some forms of generative AI for free, such as Microsoft Bing and Google Bard.
No question, as generative AI is adopted increasingly by businesses, workers will face a major adjustment. Last year, most workplace tasks could not be assisted or automated by generative AI. But by 2032, Cognizant’s research predicts that generative AI could be capable of both influencing a greater share of tasks and automating them to a greater degree.
Our research shows that over the next 10 years, 90% of jobs could experience some degree of disruption. Everyone from entry-level number crunchers to heads of business units and even C-suite executives will see their jobs evolve over the next decade.
But in contrast with prior computerization waves, the productivity gains associated with generative AI seem to go disproportionately to less experienced, lower skilled workers. In a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper titled “Generative AI at Work,” the authors (Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li, and Lindsey Raymond) conclude that generative AI benefits the less skilled because “gen AI systems work by capturing and disseminating the patterns of behavior that characterize the most productive [customer support] agents, including knowledge that has eluded automation from earlier waves of computerization.” Generative AI seems to speed individual learning by enabling novice workers to progress more rapidly along the experience curve compared with those who don’t use this capability.
Likewise, a working paper from MIT titled “Experimental Evidence on the Productivity Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence” suggests that “inequality between workers decreases as ChatGPT compresses the productivity distribution by benefiting low-ability workers more.”
If, as this early research suggests, generative AI may asymmetrically benefit the less skilled and less productive, what societal changes could result? We can recall educational reformer Horace Mann’s observation that “education, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance wheel of the social machinery.” Could generative AI become a new balance wheel of society?
I believe so, especially if we can demystify how generative AI works, be transparent about how and where it’s deployed, commit to mitigating any detrimental effects of the technology and, above all, roll out a new generation of reskilling programs on a vast scale.
How might this happen? Rather than an optional add-on to an employee’s work life, reskilling will need to become an essential part of everyone’s workday. Businesses could partner with higher education institutions to continually revamp curricula in select skill areas. Organizations could collaborate with policy makers, government officials and regulators to create shared “academy” systems that would not only teach generative AI skills but also establish new job tracks for people in roles where many tasks are likely to be fully automated by generative AI.
Keep in mind that generative AI can be deployed flexibly to accentuate people’s existing strengths while deemphasizing their weaknesses, thereby enabling an array of cognitive capabilities to be used in a wider range of roles.
Building greater trust in AI will also be crucial to ensuring its beneficial effects prevail. That’s why Cognizant recently surveyed 1,000 US consumers to discern how the level of trust and understanding of generative AI affects how they perceive this technology. While split between enthusiasm and concern, consumers are overwhelmingly positive that generative AI will make other technologies easier to use. More than half said generative AI will increase access to innovation and benefit education. And more than half also agreed that getting high-paying jobs will be easier because people can use the technology to supplement and boost their skills. The majority, however, said the widespread use of generative AI could result in greater competition for jobs—perhaps a sign of generative AI’s ability to democratize skills.
Recognizing generative AI’s potential to greatly expand our knowledge, skills and productivity, it seems this technology could, over time, bring many more people into more highly compensated work. Aided by a generative AI assistant, we can imagine a nurse taking over more tasks from doctors, while doctors have more time to focus on complex medical cases and intensive patient interaction, enhancing the overall quality of care.
To be sure, we are early in generative AI’s evolution. Still, the optimist in me believes this technology could significantly boost social mobility by bridging the longstanding digital divide and providing more people with access to well-paying jobs, while shrinking the wage premium granted to the most credentialed.
As a corollary, generative AI may also depress the compensation of some jobs held by the most educated by automating the knowledge work that used to be their exclusive domain. Therefore, by raising the socio-economic floor while lowering the ceiling, perhaps generative AI may, over time, become the new balance wheel of society.
For more insights, read our report “New World, New Work,” Visit our Generative AI webpage or contact us.
Ravi Kumar S was appointed CEO of Cognizant in January 2023. In his role as CEO, Ravi sets the strategic direction of the company, promotes Cognizant’s client-first culture, and focuses on ensuring sustainable growth and driving long-term shareholder value.
Follow
Today’s horse-race coverage of artificial general intelligence fails to consider its implications.
As agentic AI systems continue to evolve, they will become an indispensable part of the modern financial infrastructure.
In-store retail is enjoying a renaissance—and with it, familiar challenges. Judicious use of AI in retail can help businesses thrive in this new era.
Edge AI is a crucial step for AI-connected living. It also introduces challenges that telecoms and original design manufacturers need to be wary of to thrive in the era to come.
Traditional encryption methods are at risk of being broken by quantum computers. Here’s how organizations can adopt post quantum solutions to protect their digital communications and data.
Sign up for the Cognizant newsletter to gain actionable AI advice and real-world business insights delivered to your inbox every month.