AI’s Not Replacing Your Workforce Any Time Soon – but It Is Changing It
The integration of AI into government organisations isn’t just a tech upgrade; it’s a profound shift with significant implications for workforce planning, job design, job satisfaction and operating models. As public sector agencies increasingly explore AI’s potential, strategic workforce planning must evolve to optimise productivity, nurture talent, and address the changing nature of work.
Attracting and retaining talent
Will prospective recruits see your agency as somewhere they can get access to the latest tools and grow into the skills of the future? Implementing cutting-edge AI tools can be a powerful draw for the modern workforce. Government organisations providing access to and training in AI can position themselves as forward-thinking employers, which may assist in attracting and retaining digital native employees.
Retraining experts to manage AI
What are the skills you will need in five years time, and how much does that overlap with the workforce you have today? It takes a long time to shift a large workforce, and you don’t want to lose all the valuable policy expertise and corporate knowledge in this transition. These are exactly the people you need to oversee the transition to AI, controlling for quality and risks of incorrect information or decisions. This review process is likely part of their job already – but the content they review is produced by junior staff rather than AI. As more is done by AI, the value of human experts who can independently validate the work of the AI will increase dramatically.
Growing future talent
With traditionally entry-level tasks such as data entry, basic research, initial report drafting, and even some aspects of customer service becoming augmented or automated by AI tools, how will you train the grads and other workforce entrants to maintain a sustainable pipeline of experts? Learning by doing the initial drafting as a junior; receiving feedback from the experts and particularly the opportunity to ask questions and enhance their understanding is a critical component of knowledge transfer that builds expertise. If the initial drafting work is instead done by AI, agencies need to identify other paths for training and growth to ensure junior staff understand and are able to use AI tools, and have the opportunity to develop the skills needed for tasks that AI can’t do.
The future of AI is still uncertain, with many voices predicting anything from it being a bubble that will fade, to eliminating most knowledge work by 2030. We can’t know exactly the impact, but we can take action to explore and manage our workforce risks over the next 5+ years as the landscape will almost certainly shift.
If you want to talk about workforce planning for your AI-enabled future, reach out to the team today.