AI policymaking must include business leaders

The writer is founder of Decoded

There are just a few days to go until Rishi Sunak rolls out the red carpet at Bletchley Park for an A-list assortment of global tech titans, thought leaders and government policymakers. They will be joining the UK prime minister at the artificial intelligence safety conference, billed as “the first major global summit” of its kind. The agenda promises to focus on “frontier AI” risks: the misuse of cutting-edge technology, particularly biosecurity, cyber security, online safety and the existential threats of AI to human society.

Organisers of the summit are right to call for co-operation on these critical issues. But even if we avoid a collapse of our banking systems, rogue state biohacking or a Terminator-style “rise of the machines”, AI will alter the future of work. So I was disappointed to see labour issues missing from the agenda, and non-tech industry leaders’ invitations seemingly lost in the post.

Microsoft released a working paper this year showing that “up to 49 per cent of workers could have half or more of their tasks exposed to large language models”. By exposed, they mean replaced. Those potentially affected include mathematicians, web designers, accountants and journalists. In fact, hardly a single role across the over 3bn-plus global workforce will be unaffected. According to OpenAI creator Sam Altman, change will come faster than many governments or businesses are prepared for.

Imagine millions of unemployed workers in hospitality, professional services and the creative industries with few high-value new roles to move into beyond technical roles requiring highly specialised skills. The rapid mass displacement of jobs surely counts as a security and societal risk? To mitigate that, businesses leaders will need support and collaboration from policymakers, AI creators and big tech. Yet they have been largely excluded from talks. 

What kind of policies will AI creators and big tech forge on their own? Altman’s advice to the workforce has included “be resilient” and “prepare for change”. He believes that “humans always find new things to do” — hardly a policy. Business leaders outside AI could offer more pragmatic and even empathetic solutions on how to prepare the workforce for the future. For example, many organisations we work with are undertaking mass upskilling and reskilling programmes to give people opportunities to move into roles such as data engineers, software developers, data scientists and work with AI.   

Over the past three months, I have had more than 30 interviews with leaders across a wide variety of industries to understand how they are using AI and their preparedness for it. Almost every one was negotiating millions of pounds’ worth of contracts to deploy AI. They are acutely cognisant of the risks of the technology, but they are weighing those against the immense potential benefits.

A study by GitHub, Microsoft and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working in “co-pilot” with AI, found an increase in productivity of up to a 55.8 per cent and an article in Science found an overall rise in the quality of work. For a country with productivity issues such as the UK, it is tantalising. For one FTSE 100 chief executive, who has just forged a partnership with a world-leading AI company, the summit is missing a trick. “We all know what jobs AI is going to replace, but not what jobs it is going to create. Let’s make this summit about AI opportunity, not just regulation.”

The safety summit has the potential to be one of the most significant AI policy events to date and to shape the future of business and the technology for years to come. We have the opportunity to extend the invitation to business leaders across the FTSE and our striving small and medium-sized enterprises. We could give them a critical voice in the formation of AI policy and also a competitive advantage to forge partnerships and relationships that could accelerate the British economy for years to come.