Mapping Artificial Intelligence (AI) Capabilities around Human Competences : An explorative study

Abstract: Technology in the workplace has helped increase the rate of production and speed at which business occur. As these technologies advance, humans are becoming more efficient and more productive than ever before. The impact of technology on work, has consistently changed the way human across every industry do their jobs. In fact, the latest advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to further influence a greater shift in the way human accomplish job tasks. Because artificial intelligence is a technology based on augmenting human, we can use this advantage to further complement human intelligence. Making human more creative and smarter than they have ever been. To achieve this, we need to understand how AI’s capabilities can complement human’s competences. In a workplace context, we need to understand how AI can facilitate the support of different type of tasks. Hence, the purpose of this explorative study is to understand AI’s influence on people’s skills and on workflows. This is done by mapping AI capabilities around human competences to help individuals up- skill and to support organizations in planning effective workflows enabled by AI to achieve better performance. The insights for this qualitative study is gathered by developing an AI use- case with industrial partners, while carefully observing the influence AI poses on human skills and organization processes. Beyond the traditional technology optimizations that earlier helped human with speed and accuracy, the findings from this thesis show that AI could empower human through skills such as creativity, problem solving, and analysis. As a consequence, such advancement impacts the demand of human competences needed to thrive in AI enabled workplaces. The long-term impact of adapting AI to support in workplace tasks, shows a trend in moving toward more intellectually demanding tasks. While workflows will need to facilitate collaboration between cross-disciplinary teams and support high involvement.