- Job van der Voort, CEO of tech company RH Remote, says AI will give workers “superpowers”.
- He said Remote created an AI bot for staff that helps them complete tasks faster and more accurately.
- Van der Voort said he believes AI will not replace workers, but rather transform their jobs.
The CEO of an HR tech company says AI will “transform every business in the future” and give workers “superpowers”.
Job van der Voort said staff use AI to search their databases for information daily at Remote, his human resources company that helps companies employ people globally by managing their payroll, benefits social security, their compliance and their taxes.
AI “gives you superpowers,” van der Voort said. “It’s crazy powerful.”
Although companies have been using AI for years, OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in November ushered in a new era of so-called generative AI that creates text and images from prompts. Google has also launched its own generative AI, Bardwhile Microsoft launched a AI-powered version of Bing.
Generative AI platforms like these have been used by students writing essays, media outlets to publish articlesAnd job seekers to write CVs and cover letters.
But critics say AI can plagiarize material and develop a biasand some companies have warned their employees against using generative AI to help them with their work, with Amazon telling employees not to share confidential information with ChatGPT.
The platform was taken offline in Italy and tech CEOs, software engineers and professors, including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, have signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on advanced AI development.
AI “is going to transform every business in the future, I think without any exceptions,” van der Voort said. “This technology will change every business and all of our activities in the most significant way possible.”
He said Remote had created an internal AI bot using company databases that staff can use to get information on sick pay in Ireland or sabbatical leave policies in Tanzania, for example. which they can then share with customers, he said. This saves staff time and helps make their work more precise, van der Voort added.
The bot also informs staff when it doesn’t know the answer, rather than making one up, which can be a issue with these kinds of models, said van der Voort.
Van der Voort, who has a background in neuroscience, was one of the first employees of software company GitLab and became its vice president of product. He started setting up Remote in 2019and it was rated at over $3 billion Last year.
AI will not replace humans
One of the biggest concerns about AI is that it could end up causing people to quit their jobs, with Goldman Sachs believing that it could impact on 300 million full-time jobs worldwide. Legal and financial professions are among the most at risk, according to studies.
But rather than completely replacing people’s jobs, van der Voort said AI would instead lead to a redeployment of the workforce. Humans will spend more time doing tasks that require more communication or creative skills rather than simple or monotonous work, he said.
“I think the simple administrative work is going to go away because an AI can just handle it quite easily,” he continued. “Bill Gates has say the same that in the future, ChatGPT would be like “having a white collar available to help you”.
Van der Voort said Remote uses AI to automatically generate email responses to customers, but these are read by a staff member before being sent.
“In a year or two at the latest, we’ll have an AI that will respond directly to any email if it trusts it,” he said. “And if it’s not, it will transition to a human.”