By AI Guy ⏳ 4 min read

The Rundown 🏃‍♀️

• Ikea replaces call center employees with AI bots 🪑

• Macron claims France will become the AI hub of Europe 🇪🇺

• AI ‘will change warfare as much as the atomic bomb’ – UK Defence Chairman 🇬🇧

IKEA  replaces jobs with AI tool

The launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT last year left many wondering which jobs might be at risk. To add fuel to the fire, Goldman Sachs estimated 300 million jobs would be replaced by AI.

The report estimates 46% of administrative tasks could be automated, along with 44% of legal tasks. More labor-intensive jobs were deemed safer – only 6% of construction and 4% of maintenance jobs are set to be replaced.

More recently, furniture megachain IKEA  publicized that it had replaced 8,500 of its call center workers with an AI bot called ‘Billie’. Billie can have long-form conversations with customers about hundreds of topics including ordering, delivery, complaints, returns, and feedback, all in the customer’s native language.

Ikea says 47% of its current customer service interactions this year have been handled entirely by Billie (no assembly required). While IKEA has retrained thousands of customer service representatives into ‘design advisors’, the move leaves questions about the future of call centers in an AI world.

A recent survey from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) of 12,000 workers from around the globe found that a third of workers were concerned about their jobs being directly replaced by AI bots. In general, frontline workers were more concerned than managers.

If AI has not come for your job already, it is likely you’re already working with one in some capacity.

France pushes to become European AI powerhouse 🇫🇷 🇪🇺 

AI dominated the discussion this year at the Viva Tech conference in Paris. Macron, along with France’s Finance and Digital Ministers attended the conference, which is Europe’s largest tech event.

As the UK and Germany have outlined their own ambitions to become Europe’s AI Hub, Macron laid out his intentions to become an AI powerhouse.

Macron and his team also outlined his strategy to achieve this world standing. While France is yet to generate large-scale AI leaders such as America’s OpenAI, Macron said he wants to help France create “big global players” in AI. “We will invest like crazy on training and research” Macron claimed, adding that the EU must engage with the US in creating global AI regulation.

Is AI the next Atom 💣? 

UK Defence Chairman warned we have less than two years before AI becomes a “security problem we can no longer control”. Tobias Ellwood, who has led the UK’s Defence Committee since 2020, warned that would “alter the battlefield existentially”, similar to the impact of the Gatlin Gun in the US Civil War, or the Atomic Bomb in the Second World War.

While most Western military advancements have been encouraged historically encouraged, the Defence Minister warned that AI military developments must be regulated. This call for AI military regulation draws similarities to Dwight D Eisenhower’s 1953 Atoms for Peace speech in which he called for the “immediate verifiable regulation of nuclear power”.

👀 Tweet of the day. 👀

Stay AI-some!

– AI Guy

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