- Employees shouldn’t be afraid of AI, says the global chairman of PwC, Mohamed Kande.
- Instead, employees should think of AI as a digital colleague, he said.
- Kande’s comments echo other business leaders’ comments about embracing AI in the workplace.
Don’t be afraid of AI in the workplace — think of it as your digital colleague.
That’s what the global chairman of PwC, Mohamed Kande, said about AI augmentation during a panel at the World Economic Forum conference in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday.
“People fear what they don’t understand, so exposing them to the technology, putting in their hands makes a big difference,” Kande said about AI. Doing so allows employees to view AI as a “digital colleague” they can work with, said Kande.
“You don’t fear your colleagues, you partner with them,” Kande said. “So we are actually asking people to partner with the technology.”
The PwC head also said AI in the workplace should not come from the top down.
“There is this fallacy of believing that the benefits of augmentation have to come from management,” Kande said. “It has to come from the people.”
The Big Four leader‘s comments echo those made by several top executives about viewing AI as an extension of the workforce.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff have both touted the mass deployment of AI agents. AI agents break down a task into multiple smaller steps, each tackling a specific task to achieve a broader objective.
“I’m hoping that Nvidia someday will be a 50,000-employee company with 100 million AI assistants in every single group,” Huang said on a podcast in October.
On Salesforce’s third-quarter earnings call, Benioff said the company is the “largest supplier of digital labor” because of its product Agentforce, which lets clients build their own AI agents. He said the rise of digital labor means that “productivity is no longer tied to workforce growth, but to this intelligent technology that can be scaled without limits.”
In October, PwC said it has started using Agentforce and is guiding clients “through the process of activating AI agents to build on your success.”
Employees’ confidence in AI is growing — but so is their anxiety that the tech could replace them. A 2024 survey of over 13,000 employees published by Boston Consulting Group found that employees who regularly use generative AI tools are more likely to worry about job loss than those who don’t use the tool.
Of the regular generative AI users surveyed, 49% said they believe their job may disappear in the next ten years, while 24% of employees who do not use GenAI said the same.
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