To pursue responsible AI for growth, business leaders must address labour displacement

SINGAPORE’S latest Economic Strategy Review (ESR) is right to insist that artificial intelligence (AI) will be central to our next phase of growth. Its recommendations for workers who may be affected by AI, however, risk undermining both the adoption of AI and the well-being of workers.

The responsibility for coping with AI-driven disruption cannot sit largely on individual workers’ shoulders. Companies must play a key role, or they may discover that the very people they need to adopt AI will respond with caution, resistance or quiet disengagement.

In the few years running my now-defunct AI startup, I saw that the biggest impediment to AI adoption was not the technology but the middle managers – the very people recommending whether a company should adopt the technology. Managers who were employees feared being displaced; managers who were consultants or agents for companies feared their clients would use AI and drop them.