Since AI came onto the scene, employees have grappled with the question of whether technology will take away their jobs or make them more efficient.
Staff at Google DeepMind’s legal department may have found an answer to AI’s existential query. Google DeepMind now uses the Gemini AI model to handle approximately 40% to 50% of information requests sent to its legal department. Google DeepMind Director of Strategic Initiatives Tera Terwilliger said: luckCOO Summit in Middleburg, Virginia, on Monday. Google DeepMind is an artificial intelligence research laboratory and a subsidiary of Google.
Google DeepMind’s legal department uses AI “to find information that you know you have somewhere, but can’t get your hands on at the time,” Terwilliger said. Although it’s “the primary use case of simply retrieving and finding that information, it saves a notable amount of time,” she said.
Google isn’t the only company using AI for routine tasks involving paperwork. Sebastian Guth, chief operating officer of Bayer’s global pharmaceutical division, said the company regularly uses AI to fill out parts of regulatory filing packages required to be compiled as part of the research and development process for its drugs. Guth estimated that the company used artificial intelligence to fill between 70% and 80% of these files required by regulatory agencies around the world.
While the details of these two examples may be different, both Bayer and Google are primarily using AI to make their organizations run more smoothly. Guth called these “workflow efficiencies” during his onstage interview.
“There is a lot of paperwork that needs to be automated so that highly skilled people can do more high-value tasks,” Terwilliger added.
Applying artificial intelligence in workflows
Keeping employees up to date on new AI use cases won’t happen overnight. This means that companies will have to make an effort to train employees on how to best use AI, even in the most obvious cases. Terwilliger urged the COO audience to remember that training employees to use AI will take time and effort.
Operations managers should “make sure we value the time people take to learn how to use these systems and reward them for doing so,” she said.
Guth had a word of caution of his own. “In large organizations, there is sometimes a risk of using technology for technology’s sake,” he said. “In my opinion, ultimately, it’s a means to an end.”
He added that Bayer’s ultimate goal is to develop drugs and medicines faster than was previously possible. “It’s not about chasing shiny toys just for the sake of chasing them,” Guth said.
However, these early forays into AI do not mean that the technology will slowly replace scientists and researchers working in the pharmaceutical industry, according to Guth.
“Actually, I don’t think AI will steal jobs, because detecting 3 billion years of evolution in a cell is very difficult,” he said. “It will continue to require human capabilities and the art of science.”
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