A news article in 2018 about an auction at Christie’s of a painting called Portrait of Edmond Belamy caught my eye. This painting sold for about $432,500, about 43 times its reserve price. So, what was special about this painting? It was the first auctioned piece created by an algorithm!

We have also read stories about AI helping create music. In fact, David Bowie helped develop a program to help him composing way back in 1990s.

Why am I highlighting these things? Because we are now looking at a man-machine combination being far more productive and cost-effective and already impacting domains traditionally not thought to be linked to structured approaches.

But far before unstructured domains became ripe for an algorithmic invasion, routine structured tasks were mechanized or enhanced using technology. The rise of Microsoft Office suite and other productivity tools had brought skills (like calligraphy, drafting, etc.) otherwise available to a handful of people to the masses. Today, very few people learn calligraphy to become a professional in the domain.

In the last few years, jobs like complex sales and CRM became available to people who would be termed relatively less smart using traditional measures due to the presence of very complex pieces of software from companies like Salesforce. While some timeless principles of complex sales need to be learned and some intelligence is still needed, a lot of the heavy-lifting is done by the software.

In the capital markets, increasingly, most of the trading is done by algorithms. They are faster than humans and do multiple trades within seconds. However, the rules for trading that the machines follow are determined by human traders at the beginning of the trading period.

All these examples portend that the jobs of the future will invariably involve a partnership with machines across all domains. The structured rule-based aspects of the job would be done efficiently by machines while the on-the-spot empathy-driven front-end roles would be handled by human beings.

In such an environment, empathy and good communication skills become the primary skillsets that companies would be hiring for. Add to that the ability to learn quickly as the more successful people usually understand the underlying logic to enhance and exploit the machines’ abilities to their benefit better than others.

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