A new report from Willis Towers Watson has found that less than 5% of companies in the Asia-Pacific region believe they, and their HR departments, are prepared for the changing requirements AI and automation will bring to the workforce.
The Global Future of Work Survey, released by the international brokerage last week, found that businesses in the region expect automation to account for, on average, 23% of work being done over the next three years compared to just 13% of work which is currently carried out using AI and automation today.
Adam Hall, future of work leader, Australia, at Willis Towers Watson, said that while businesses are “broadly aware” of the impact automation will have on the workforce, the depth of understanding is still lacking.
“That is not to say there aren’t some organisations that are quite progressed in their thinking about this and are actively changing things but I would say the general awareness was accurately reflected in the survey,” Hall told Insurance Business.
Hall noted that “no industry is immune” to automation, and AI changes will continue to filter through the workforce over the coming years. He added that businesses will begin to look to move automation past processes alone.
“Organisations will be looking at a way of redesigning jobs that contain a lot of routine cognitive work to automate that routine work and free up the capacity of those people to do more value-add work, or to change the way those people work inside the organisation,” he said. “That affects every organisation. If you are in a finance function and you have people doing financial reporting, if you are in a compliance or regulation role in a financial services organisation, they are the kind of jobs that we see as being very susceptible to automation in the quite near future.”
With automation a buzzword for the insurance industry, and with chatbots and AI functions increasingly becoming part of both insurer and broker offerings, Hall said that in order to prepare for these changes, businesses and their HR functions firstly need to have a mindset change.
“Rather than thinking HR’s job is about stewarding employment, to think about HR as the orchestrator of how work gets done and to make that shift, it really is about getting out there and engaging with what is happening from a technology perspective,” Hall said.
