Human-AI symbiosis is way forward, as history tends to repeat itself.

Al has become buzzword lately, and lot of people are expressing their concerns over Al killing lot of ‘jobs done by real humans’. It may seem very plausible prediction, but is isn't that straight forward. Let me put a different perspective on all this by comparing it to similar evolution happened a decade back in marketing. When digital marketing started picking up pace in various industries, people started talking about how it will take away traditional marketers jobs or it is the only future and traditional marketing will go away. Again it didn't come out as a very correct prediction and what we see today is much better scenario than predicted by many experts (a decade back everyone was an expert and not an influencer, Instagram converted those experts into influencers). It took a while to traditional marketing people to understand how digital works and they adopted it very well. Today you can see lot of marketers doing exceptionally well with mix of traditional and digital marketing. Many of the top digital marketers (not the lame award winners) today have some good experience in traditional marketing.

How this has happened? - Every time a new technology emerge, early adopters figure out some good hacks out of it and show the way forward for rest of the word. Those hacks, tactics become major reference for slow adopters and they try to do the same, which eventually does not work as expected. Then they figure out some mid-ground and it sets the norm for the industry. Looking from the 10000 feet, digital marketing is just an extended delivery channel for the regular marketing. Also definition of the marketing has evolved over the same time and now marketing is tightly integrated in almost every aspect of the businesses. Operational excellence and agility made those digital experts succeed till the time industry caught up. Now to be the great digital marketing leader, you need lot more than it required a decade back. As we can see a digital leader just can't succeed being great campaign manager, they need to understand journeys, user touchpoints, underline technology, omni-channel impact and lot lot more.

In a nutshell we can conclude that digital marketing has definitely increased the size of the pie, obviously it is the part of that same pie, it could never become exclusive or standalone future. It created lot more new opportunities for businesses and generated so many new jobs which didn't even exist few years back. The way it created lot of jobs over decade, it also took away (modified) lot of them. For example, to run a banner ad on Linkedin in around 2013-14 marketers need to give them all details in some sort of excel then Linkedin's operation executive will upload it into their systems and your ads will start running. Today that Linkedin operation executive definitely not uploading those excels, rather she might be working on something else. Her role evolved, she had to adopt different skills to manage those automations which took away her earlier job. But she is still employed / employable and doing lot more work with way more efficiency, just because original underline technology evolved. Another example can be huge positive impact on PR companies, entire construct of the PR has changed with the evolution in digital media.

Now lets put Al in similar scenario. As per influencers Al will write code, create content and is capable of doing lot more (even unimaginable today), which is factually true but not the complete truth. Like Al is capable of doing everything and anything, still there are enough limitations for Al to take over humans and their jobs. As per my understanding and observation Al may become very strong tool for humans to create and scale things at unimaginable pace. Definitely Al will become part of our daily lives sooner or later but it will not take over everything. Point I am trying to make is very simple, Al will eliminate many jobs at the same time it will create many more than it eliminated. As AI will become more and more popular, it wont substitute for humans, instead it will complement. In a way humans can substitute each other and that’s why they compete for jobs, resources, power etc. AI need not. And that's the future I think we are headed towards Human-AI symbiosis.