'No reason' for Guernsey to lose jobs to AI

The founder of a new business said while jobs may look different in the future, there is "no reason why Guernsey would lose net jobs" to artificial intelligence (AI).

The CEO of Bank Aston, Paul Gorman, has about 10 employees pre-launch and plans to use AI as part of the bank's workflow.

"You may lose existing jobs, but those statistics don't take account of the new jobs that are being created because of the advent of new technologies," he said.

In 2020, work by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in the Channel Islands estimated that about 10,800 jobs in Guernsey were at risk due to automation between then and 2035.

Callum McCutcheon, a director at PwC Guernsey, said they were not seeing a decline in entry level roles yet but the future workforce would need to adapt.

"There will be new roles and there will be new applications and areas for people to deploy AI," he said.

Des Gorman, a lecturer for The Guernsey Institute, said the island needed to be doing "more" to prepare students for AI in the workplace.

He said: "Our students are going to have to be more adaptable to change as the world goes forward.

"At the college we are producing a syllabus that we can give to students to make them ready to use AI... but the pace of change with AI is quicker than we can keep up with in terms of supporting students."

Elliott Cockett, managing director of TDR Studio - a video production company, said "AI has changed the way that we work quite a lot" and "allows us to play like the bigger agencies but on a much lower budget".

He said whilst it means they do not have to expand their team unnecessarily, the technology does not "replaces juniors in anyway".

"You'll just find that the skill set changes... what I'm looking at even now when I'm employing is does this person have any knowledge in AI," Cockett said.

Warren Mauger, managing director of Spike Productions, said AI has been "very disruptive" to the creative industry.

"Lots of people that I know in the industry are leaving it or considering leaving it and a lot of that is down to the impact that AI is having," he said.

But he does not think that the effects of the technology on the job market are permanent.

"We have to use AI and use it as a tool and we have to rethink about how we do things... the next generation coming through will be using it in a different way to say people who've already been working in this industry for 20 years," Mauger added.

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