Business leaders urged to hurry on automation retraining

Australian business leaders are confident that the looming rise of artificial intelligence-powered automation will increase employment, rather than destroy jobs, but are not moving fast enough to retrain staff for changed roles a study from Accenture has found. In a new report entitled "Future Workforce: Reworking The Revolution," Accenture refers to findings from a global study it timed to coincide with the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, which found that there is a notable disconnect between the importance organisations place on AI and automation and how much they are doing to equip staff for the change. The Australian responses to the study showed that 71 per cent of Australian senior executives think that their company will create net job gains in the next three years through AI, and 60 per cent of workers believe it will have a positive impact, rather than taking their job. Accenture's Andrew Woolf says the pace of technology change is accelerating and reskilling staff is part of the solution to the challenge. However, while 53 per cent of business leaders said human-machine collaboration was important to their strategic priorities, only 3 per cent said their organisation planned to significantly increase investment in reskilling workers in the next three years.