Life template for the AI era
Recruiters vs AI
Life template for the AI era
Recruiters vs AI
Gemini AI-powered Electric Vehicle
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Life template for the AI era
Most of us are still living by an Industrial Age life script — learn, work, retire. Yet, AI with human-like capabilities, able to operate around the clock, is making that script irrelevant. Businesses are at the forefront of this shift — they operate at the edge of change, where new skill demands surface long before traditional systems can respond. For the past century, the broad framework for life progression — learning, career, retirement — has been largely unchanged. Innovation did occur within each stage, yet it did so largely within the existing framework, and new pathways to support a more fluid reality have not materialized at scale. And while AI is now seen as indispensable in the workplace, with businesses considering its use critical to adaptation, teachers are struggling with how to integrate it into the educational experience.
Our scaffolding for work and retirement similarly lacks the plasticity needed to support more dynamic career paths and people’s desire to continue making meaningful contributions into later life. Longer lifespans and rapid skill turnover suggest careers will be more fluid and people will have to cycle through multiple “learn – unlearn – relearn – work” phases over a lifetime, with periods of renewal built in. Finally, we lack widely-adopted pathways for late career contributions. Too often, experienced workers end up competing for roles optimized for early-career strengths, when competencies that often deepen with experience – judgment under ambiguity, systems thinking, the ability to mentor, to de-escalate, to build trust — could deliver significant value. Intentional redesign must yield systems that allow for a gradual ramp-down without losing status, income, or belonging.
Education, work, and retirement are ultimately institutional answers to fundamental societal needs: turning people into capable, value-anchored individuals who can navigate and improve their world; converting human potential into value, for oneself and society; and providing structured support for the work transition that comes with age, health changes or changing priorities.
In the US, apprenticeships have historically been associated with the trades, but that’s changing. At Cognizant, we’re partnering with educational institutions on paid apprenticeships that offer work-based learning and serve as early talent pipelines. A new life template also needs explicit structures for later-life contribution, with recognized roles and pathways that enable workers to change how they contribute over time. With life expectancy at around 78 years in the US and evidence linking a strong sense of purpose to better cognitive health. Businesses play a critical role in building a new, integrated system of learning and work because they see change first. They own the tools and data shaping modern work, and they sense when a capability becomes obsolete or when a new one is needed....
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Recruiters vs AI
Manny harried recruiters would have greeted the release of ChatGPT with glee. At last, a tool that could ease the burden of drafting job descriptions, scheduling interviews and rejecting candidates. Like happy beachgoers who cannot see an approaching tsunami, they failed to predict what came next. A giant wave of AI- generated applications has washed over them. The number of job applications an average candidate sends has risen by 239% since ChatGPT’s release in 2022, according to global data collected by Greenhouse, a provider of applicant-tracking software. Paid services like LazyApply and aiApply let candidates submit applications while they sleep, tailoring résumés and cover letters to a tee.
AI has even made it easier for spies and fraudsters to infiltrate companies. Last month Amazon blocked 1,800 applications from North Koreans applying for remote IT jobs. Gartner, a consultancy, predicts that by 2028 as many as one in four candidate profiles could be fake. Inundated recruiters are taking various steps in response. Some are politely asking candidates to refrain from using chatbots. Anthropic, an AI lab, asks candidates not to submit entirely AI- generated cover letters. So does Mastercard, a payments provider. Others are capping the number of applications a person can submit. OpenAI, another AI lab, limits candidates to a maximum of five over a six-month period. Companies are also speeding up their use of AI to help winnow the growing pile of résumés and cover letters. Two-thirds of recruiters plan to increase their use of the technology to conduct screening calls, according to data from LinkedIn, a social network for professionals. Many also use AI to sift through applications and flag those that match the criteria for a job, though firms such as KPMG, a professional-services giant, are keen to emphasize that humans make final decisions. AI models can even recommend applicants for one role as candidates for another, says Alicia Pittman, who directs hiring for BCG, a consultancy. Still, the time it takes for companies to fill vacancies has declined only slightly since 2021, according to Ashby, a recruiting-software company. When it comes to adopting AI, recruiters face a structural disadvantage compared with job applicants, reckons Robert Newry, co-founder of Arctic Shores, a psychometric testing firm. Jobseekers need not worry whether an AI tool will run afoul of anti-discrimination or data-protection laws. They do not need to check with their boss or IT department before adopting the latest technology. “I say to my clients: ‘In the arms race between you and the candidate, you will lose,’” says Mr Newry.
Eventually the rise of AI may change hiring more fundamentally. Companies could rely more on tasks that cannot be pasted into chatbots, such as visual puzzles, says Mr Newry. They might also rely more on finding candidates before they even think to apply. Juicebox, a recruitment startup, offers a service called “PeopleGPT” that automates the process of hunting for possible hires across the web. It says that many of its clients have reduced the time it takes to find candidates by half. LinkedIn has rolled out a “Hiring Assistant” for recruiters that trawls the site for suitable candidates.
Companies may one day abandon the job application entirely, to the delight of recruiters and candidates alike. Daniel Chait, boss of Greenhouse, reckons that both sides will eventually use AI agents to talk to one another and determine whether they might be a match. “We’re at the point today where it’s automating tasks,” Mr Chait says. “I’m eager to get to the part where we can think about why we have job posts at all.” Until then, recruiters will have to wade through a sea of em-dashes and eerily polished résumés as they search for the perfect hire....
Read the original on the Economist
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Gemini AI-powered Electric Vehicle
Volvo’s ground-breaking, mid-sized electric SUV will be the first to ship with Google’s Gemini AI assistant already baked in, allowing for more natural conversations between occupants and the car itself. Combining hardware from Nvidia and Qualcomm with both Google and in-house developed software, Volvo says its brilliantly-named ‘HuginCore’ system is powerful enough to deliver highly personalized and deeply integrated responses via Google’s Gemini voice assistant.
Complex tasks can be managed through more natural and “multi-turn” conversation, rather than drivers having to remember specific commands or by having to prod various menus that pop up on the touchscreen display. Volvo gives a number of potential use cases for the technology, such as searching for a hotel booking address in a linked email account (Gmail presumably works best), checking if a recently bought item fits in your EX60 trunk, or brainstorming ideas for an upcoming road trip.
Rather than merely acting as a built-in voice assistant that takes care of a limited amount of vehicle functionality, Gemini integration means drivers and occupants can deal with life admin via any linked Google services, as well as ask more generic questions. It’s also tipped to play nicely with Google Maps, which has become widely regarded as the dominant mapping and navigation service for drivers. This means owners can check if locations are open and even book hotels and restaurants on the move with natural voice prompts, in theory at least. The next-generation Snapdragon Cockpit Platform from Qualcomm provides the highest levels of processing power ever seen on a Volvo, while Nvidia’s latest Drive AGX Orin system-on-a-chip runs the operating system as a whole. Combined, this is said to offer a lag-free infotainment system with maps that load instantly and voice assistants that don’t take an age to compute the request and respond.
The race is now on for automotive manufacturers to deliver AI-powered voice assistants that are actually useful. Up until this point, they have been clunky, to say the least, with response times long and multiple attempts often required to get the desired answer….