This is a fundamental question that leaders in business and academia are grappling with, and we are only beginning to get a sense of what the enduring human skills are in this nascent phase of human and machine collaboration.
Imagine that you are responsible for operations at a large manufacturer and you want to maximize the life of equipment parts while avoiding unnecessary downtime. In the past, your maintenance team relied on "tribal knowledge" estimates or doing an ongoing, in-depth analysis of each piece of equipment. Today smart factories can use machine-to-machine and machine-to-human communication with cognitive technologies to make timely, accurate decisions. This predictive maintenance raises thought-provoking questions about the role of maintenance personnel versus the role of predictive algorithms, and what kind of traits a modern-day maintenance worker should possess.
Determining the immutable human skills needed in a workplace filled with AI solutions is hard, but necessary work. The need for human involvement is not going away, and the value of powerful, esoteric capabilities like imagination cannot be underestimated.
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