AI-Driven Revolution Boosts Productivity in Global Economy, Report Finds

Artificial intelligence-related skills offer better wages, as claimed by a newly reported PwC study that analyzed 15 countries and roughly half a billion job postings within those nations.

The new report also found that AI-exposed sectors in the global economy are experiencing a boost in productivity.

The results of the new study reportedly show that there is a financial benefit for workers: in certain areas, employment requiring AI expertise can pay up to 25% more on average.

Jobs requiring specialized AI abilities have a considerable wage premium (up to 25% on average in the US) in the five major labor markets for which wage data is available (US, Canada, UK, Australia, and Singapore).

This can vary among industries (in the US, for instance), with accountants making up 18%, financial analysts making up 33%, sales and marketing managers making up 43%, and lawyers making up 49%. Although the pay premium varies per market, the report states it is generally higher across all markets examined.

According to PwC data, the number of jobs requiring AI abilities has grown at a higher rate than all other professions since 2016. Since 2016, the number of job listings requiring AI skills has increased by 3.5 times the rate of growth in all jobs.

AI-Powered Productivity Increase

The report also states that worker productivity grows over five times, or 4.8 times, in industries exposed to AI. According to the report, there were seven job ads for everyone in 2012 that required AI expert abilities.

The Guardian states that the impact of AI on the labor market has been discussed since the introduction of ChatGPT in late 2022, but PwC claims that the effects have been felt for over ten years. Ads for specialized AI positions increased sevenfold from a low base in 2012, while all other job ads doubled.

According to the paper, the employment growth in occupations exposed to artificial intelligence suggests that the introduction of generative AI did not signal the start of a period of job losses.

According to a report by the left-leaning Institute for Public Policy Research think tank, there might be an employment "apocalypse" in the UK within the next few years that eliminates up to 8 million jobs.

AI Implementation in Employment

The study demonstrates how AI is still being used in the workplace in a variety of ways a real-world illustration of this is how a recent report found that 50% of contact centers intend to implement AI within a year to save costs and improve operations.

Businesswoman Evie Wang notes that AI is becoming popular in contact centers and advises operators to use speech bots with AI capabilities to reduce wait times and operating expenses.

Wang is a co-founder of Retell AI, a platform that enables businesses to handle customer inquiries and appointment booking using AI-powered voice operators. Retell's agents use huge language models tailored to customer service as well as voice models to enable seamless and effective interactions.

Retell provides services to SMBs and contact center operators that handle high phone volumes, such as Ro, a healthcare company. With Retell's low-code toolkit, users can integrate proprietary LLMs or create custom speech agents.

While Retell's initial trials were promising, more work needed to be done on voice realism. The script adherence and low latency of the platform may alter the dynamics of call centers. Retell and other similar systems might not be appropriate for complex investigations due to the issues with LLMs.

Retell is growing its clientele despite these challenges, and Y Combinator has invested $4.53 million in the company. Wang expresses optimism over Retell, highlighting the significant contributions that voice synthesis and LLM have made to conversational AI.

(Photo: Tech Times)