Michael Herron British head of French IT services provider Atostold Computer Weekly that ensuring future talent can get on the first rung of the career ladder – despite the implications of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) – is a topic close to his heart.
Organizations need to rethink career paths as GenAI increasingly takes on tasks once performed by professionals early in their careers, and the IT sector can play a key role in setting an example of how humans and GenAI can coexist.
Atos is recruiting 50 graduates and apprentices next year as part of its plan to increase its UK workforce, which currently numbers around 3,600. Herron said these plans will take into account the growing use of GenAI.
“I'm working on this whole model of humans and AI coexistence because AI can do some people's jobs,” he said.
Herron added that with two children, he worries about the young people's careers in the future.
“Imagine someone is a developer, now or certainly within 12 months: AI will fill or is filling these junior developer roles – these are the roles on the ladder for [our] children who are no longer there,” he said.
Eliminate career impact
As an executive at a large IT company, Herron believes he is in a position to help. “My job as CEO is to stop worrying about it and do something about it,” he said. “I need to create completely new and modern career paths that are different from the ones that came before.”
Herron added that there is a need to create “more three-dimensional career paths” where people early in their careers can “even be mid- or senior-level developers.”
He said that although technologies such as Microsoft Copilot can do most of the workhe still needs a pilot and needs training and grants that can help change his career path.
“And it doesn’t bother me,” Herron said. “I'm actually really excited that there could be a lot more 3D career paths, and that's why I say it's AI and human, not AI or human. I'm going to get more students and offer more grants, and I'm going to create different, newer, more modern career paths for them.”
He called these career paths more “ubiquitous,” adding that programmers can become testers and testers can become developers. “Some of our best architects that we've used now have been real estate developers,” Herron said.
“AI has taken over the work that was previously done by a human, and it is the human’s job to nurture and develop it so that it has the same efficiency and can bring the same benefits,” he said. “I think they can co-exist, and I'm absolutely confident of that, but it will be very different from before. We used to come in at level one and work our way up to level two, but that just went out the window.”
No sector was left untouched
According to research from OpenAI and the University of Pennsylvania, GenAI will impact business professionals including accountants, paralegals and financial analysts. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs in March 2023 published data on 300 million jobs affected by AI across all sectors.
On the changing roles of software developers, Sam Kingston, CEO of software services company Zenitech, said: “Skills such as critical thinking, creativity, communication and understanding user needs become even more important as AI performs more direct coding tasks. AI assistants can provide explanations for code snippets, suggest relevant documentation and help developers understand unfamiliar codebases faster.”
“We see AI not as a replacement for developers, but as a catalyst for human potential, enabling both technical and non-technical teams to create and learn faster,” he said. “By retraining talent to collaborate with AI, we advance roles and accelerate results throughout the development lifecycle.”
The IT sector has an advantage in understanding the power of AI and, as a result, where people can thrive with it, but the same challenges are faced across all sectors adopting AI.
For example, the legal industry is increasingly using artificial intelligence to reduce costs and improve process efficiency. Earlier this year, a law firm based on this technology, which can complete the lawsuit process with little to no human intervention, received approval from Office for the Regulation of Lawyers' Activitieswho called it a “landmark.”
This week, the law firm known as Three points was launched with artificial intelligence at its core. It says the use of AI will mean that a company that specializes in managing large business transactions will have to hire far fewer people to get started than would be required of a traditional law firm.
Co-founder Simon Leaf told Computer Weekly: “By leveraging the technology we have, custom prompts and other workflows, we are less likely to need more junior staff.”
He acknowledged there was uncertainty about how this would impact people starting their careers in the sector.
AI is permeating every area of law. Neil Hudgell, founder of Hudgell Solicitors, said the company was starting to use AI in the back office and for tasks such as document verification. He said he doesn't expect this to reduce career opportunities at his firm because the business is very people-oriented, but added that managing it “will be more difficult in more transactional law firms.”
