Degreed, VP of Product Management, Nicole Helmer - AITech Interview

Hello Nicole, welcome to AITech. Could you tell us about your professional background and being VP of Product Management at Degreed?

My background is a prime example of how taking a skills view opens new opportunities and career mobility. I’ve worked in different roles and industries: defense/public service, consumer advertising, travel, retail, and high-tech. I’ve worked in procurement and operations roles, I’ve been in product and account management roles, and I’ve been a data scientist. Just before joining Degreed, I was leading learning globally for SAP.

While they may seem unrelated, a skills view of each of these roles shows how similar and overlapping they are.

AI is reshaping industries across the world. From your perspective, which industries or job functions are most urgently in need of AI-related skills, and why?

Every industry and every job that exists today will be reshaped due to AI. The question I contemplate is what percentage of the jobs to be done will be automated, what percentage will be augmented, and which will remain as they are.

Depending on the answer to those percentages, will the role continue to exist as we know it? Or will the jobs to be done shift so dramatically that the function is eliminated or merged with another adjacent role? I think we’ve only seen the first act of this play – with companies anticipating AI efficiencies conducting mass layoffs. Now, we will see the second act of jobs being reconstructed with ideally more efficient approaches to existing processes – and entirely new jobs to be done will be introduced.

Job functions may be affected differently – for example, in many cases, we will observe an escalation of complexity where the lower-level work can now be automated. Consider an entry-level customer service call representative. This work will be substantially automated at the lower levels of complexity. Customer service will still be necessary, but the work handled by human reps will be more complex in certain situations. However, in other places, middle-level jobs may be disintermediated; a medical tech may still be required to draw blood, but the work to analyze results may be heavily assisted/automated.

Rather than pointing out any particular industry, any workers who perform their work primarily at a desk will find a selection of AI skills essential to their future employment, as everything you can do from a computer will be massively reshaped by AI.

But, I am most excited to see how AI impacts the life sciences industry.

To Read Full Interview, Visit @ https://ai-techpark.com/aitech-interview-with-nicole-helmer/

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