Career development
AI and skills development in banking: what premises?
In a context of uncertainty, the professional world calls for the mobilization of multiple, highly specialized and versatile skills. The rapid growth of generative artificial intelligence now increases the risk of accelerating obsolescence in many sectors.
According to the recent 2024[1 ] edition of PWC's CEO Survey, 63% of participating executives in Switzerland expect generative artificial intelligence to require new skills from their employees in the medium term. Since it was made available to the general public on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT has taken center stage with its massive, lightning-fast adoption. There will be a before and after ChatGPT.
Assessments of the risks and opportunities presented by products from OpenAI and its various competitors are now multiplying. This is because the ChatGPT application and the successive models it integrates are constantly evolving, marking a break in the digital transformation that has been taking place since the mid-1990s.
This transformation, which began three decades ago, has been the subject of countless articles and books describing the accompanying upheavals at societal, organizational and individual levels. It has led to the wildest speculations about work and employment. A major 2016 report[2 ] on the social impacts of the digitization of the economy, produced by the European Trade Union Institute, described the 4th Industrial Revolution, which celebrates the digital revolution, as a "perfect storm" on labor markets. This despite the fact that the term "artificial intelligence" appeared only once in the 80-page report. Not too surprising, considering that the main fear at the time was that robots would replace unskilled or low-skilled work.
Generative AI, future skills and soft skills
Now, generative artificial intelligences, with ChatGPT at the top of the list, are also competing with tasks that hitherto mobilized human intellectual and creative faculties. To varying degrees, upheavals in work and employment are already underway in some sectors, and many hitherto unscathed workers are watching the threat grow. The question of job destruction by AI is fuelling the debate between techno-pessimists and techno-optimists, as was already the case with automation.
For the time being, work continues to play a major role in people's lives. Faced with the growing need for companies to innovate in order to create value and thus ensure their long-term survival, creativity in the workplace has become as important as production was in the industrial age.
With the development of AI, where the strength of the human being lies in his or her ability to deal with the unpredictable, human added value is increasingly based on a combination of hard and soft skills. Added to solid technical knowledge and skills, soft skills are undoubtedly the best way for humans to compete with machines.
Of all the soft skills models available, the 4Cs are the most popular. The OECD and the World Economic Forum, in particular, identify the 4Cs as the essential skills needed to meet the challenges of tomorrow's world of work. Communication, cooperation, critical thinking and creativity are the skills least likely to be reduced to algorithms, and should therefore be developed as a priority.
Swiss banking, generative artificial intelligence and opportunities
The Swiss banking sector experienced its greatest expansion between 1960 and 1990. Since then, from the beginnings of the digital transformation of the 90s, through the financial crisis of 2008, to the recent covid crisis, banks have constantly reinvented themselves to cope with an unstable economic and political context, as well as new customer behaviours. These changes, both far-reaching and complex, have necessitated significant adjustments.
Financial institutions have been working on the use of artificial intelligence for some time now. However, the emergence of generative AI and the acceleration of its evolution pose new challenges and could offer unprecedented development prospects, which will need to be identified and assessed, as in other contexts in the past.
With the switch to automated teller machines in the 90s, banks seized the opportunity to transform their initial teller activities into customer advisory services, revealing a latent demand and opening up new avenues for business development. This change led to an increase in skills for a number of professionals, and boosted employment.
The questions for today and tomorrow concerning AI and generative AI in particular are innumerable. How can banks create new products and services and enrich the customer experience thanks to AI? How can AI facilitate access to knowledge and decision-making on operational and strategic axes? And above all, what skills are needed to undertake these changes, and how can employees be involved in them, making the most of their talents? For the time being, it's very difficult to answer these questions and all those to come, but they deserve to be asked beyond the divide between techno-pessimists and techno-optimists.
[1 ] https://www.pwc.ch/fr/insights/ceo-survey/2024.html
[2] https://www.etui.org/fr/publications/working-papers/les-impacts-sociaux-de-la-digitalisation-de-l-economie
Stéphane Bonzon
ISFB
Psychologist
"To varying degrees, upheavals in work and employment are already underway in some industries, and many hitherto unscathed workers are watching the threat grow. The question of job destruction by AI is fuelling the debate between techno-pessimists and techno-optimists, as was already the case with automation."
Strategic Business Area 3
Career development
In addition to its range of technical and managerial training courses, the ISFB offers its member banks' human resources departments a range of guidance and career management services.