(upbeat music) - Just to familiarize people, what is WIN?

What is the Workforce Intelligence Network?

- Yeah, the Workforce Intelligence Network is a collaborative between many community colleges and Michigan works agencies, primarily focused in southeast Michigan.

The current WIN coverage map includes 19 counties in Michigan, which I believe comprise around 65% of the total labor force in the state of Michigan.

So we have a lot of eyes and ears on the ground in terms of what's happening with workforce development, what opportunities there are in terms of training workers, upskilling workers, and getting people ready for not only the current jobs that are out there, but also the jobs that are on the horizon.

- Give us little insight into why WIN decided to start looking seriously at artificial intelligence and how that's gonna be impacting the workforce.

- When you look at the rate of adoption for generative AI, and in particular, for this example, ChatGPT, I think it was just a matter of nobody wants to be last.

So we had some discussions internally at the Workforce Intelligence Network about how we can leverage AI, how we can best start to learn and understand and be able to utilize those outputs and the tool itself.

- Take us through what the findings were when it comes to whether or not layoffs should be a real concern or how that's going to work.

- When researchers start to measure the impact of AI, the challenge is going to be how do you differentiate the job losses due to AI compared with job losses that would have occurred anyways due to other economic indicators.

But in terms of whether people should expect layoffs due to generative AI, I think there's actually very little reason for concern for layoffs due specifically to generative AI tools.

And going back to the research that Goldman Sachs published, a lot of these programs are going to influence occupations in terms of net productivity, but they're incapable, they're not purpose-built to replace an employee.

What I think should also be part of the conversation is how many of these businesses will take those productivity gains and re-leverage the freed employee time to create new revenue streams or enhance revenue opportunities.

- Explain a little bit about why DEI would be an important thing to keep in mind as time grows, as AI becomes more ubiquitous.

- So when we looked at the diversity, equity, and inclusion outcomes of generative AI, and keeping in mind that this is all still very, very new.

I mean, generative AI itself has only been publicly available en masse less than 24 months.

One of the very early findings already is when researchers started to look at what is the demographic makeup of these occupation groups and these industries that are going to be most impacted by generative AI, they are disproportionately women-dominant.

So when you consider that generative AI is going to most heavily impact white collar jobs, extrapolating those two facts, that generative AI will disproportionately impact white collar jobs, and that white collar jobs are predominantly female, then you start to see that there's going to be a disparate impact on women due to generative AI.

Employers can try and get in front of this and begin instituting policies at the individual employer level to just try and maintain some semblance of fairness in the workplace and representativeness in the workplace, such that generative AI doesn't displace workers en masse from any particular demographic.

- If you're someone in a white collar job who might feel like they might be impacted by AI in the coming five to 10 years, from your perspective, from the data that you guys are seeing, how should they approach this wave of technological advancement we're going through?

- I think just starting to dip your toes in the water of generative AI.

Feel free to play around with one of the programs, one of the many free programs that are available to the public.

Google has one now, it's Google Gemini.

Meta just announced that they have one that's publicly available.

There's still ChatGPT.

The Workforce Intelligence Network is currently using Microsoft Copilot and learning how to use integrated AI tools.

So there's so much that you can learn, but it's a matter of taking that first step.

- If you're a student, if you're either starting college and you're looking at what you might want to go into, if you are exiting college and you're entering the workforce, or if you're just a young person who's getting started in the workforce, what advice would you give to them?

Maybe somebody who doesn't have a decade's worth of experience under their belt already.

- When I started using ChatGPT myself, I thought, well let's play around with this.

Let's see what it's capable of producing when I prompt it to give me an SEO-optimized blog post and I hand feed it some of these keywords, it was able to do so.

But it's because I knew what SEO optimized meant.

So I knew what the end goal was.

I knew that keywords was a very important part of producing content that would get clicks.

So having that domain-level knowledge is imperative for being able to even meet the entry cost for utilizing generative AI to any meaningful degree.

Generative AI should take a backseat to the career aspirations that you have in terms of subject matter.

If you have subject matter expertise first, generative AI will enhance that.

But subject matter has to come first.