Building the skills for an AI-enabled workforce

The finance industry is in the midst of what some have dubbed the AI revolution.

Only a few years ago, much of the conversation around artificial intelligence was still speculative and focussed on what it might become, how it might affect our lives and what it could mean for the future of work.

In a remarkably short space of time, that conversation has shifted. AI is now increasingly embedded in our everyday lives and workplaces, with tools already being used to support tasks that would previously have taken significant human time and resource.

While it is still a developing area, and one which has much work to be done in terms of risk and procedural assessment, the financial and related professional services (FRPS) sector is beginning to reap the benefits of this change. Knowing when to use it – and just as importantly, when to question it – will become increasingly important as its adoption continues.

AI is already changing the nature of jobs in the FRPS sector, particularly by automating or accelerating routine research, drafting, data processing and administrative tasks.

In our experience so far, AI is not replacing whole roles. Instead, we are seeing it change where people spend their time with the potential to enable employees to contribute to more complex work earlier on in a project. However, adoption is still evolving, and experiences vary across firms, with some organisations even reassessing or scaling back deployments where the expected benefits have not yet materialised. The challenge therefore is not simply to adopt AI, but to ensure that productivity gains are reinvested in meaningful work and that employees continue to develop the technical knowledge and judgment they need.

For those well established in the industry, this transition may require adapting familiar ways of working and thinking about where AI can add value in practice. For those entering the workforce, however, working alongside AI is increasingly likely to be part of the environment they encounter from the start.

There is real value in bringing these perspectives together. Combining the deep sector knowledge, experience and professional judgment of established practitioners with the confidence and different approaches to technology that newer entrants may bring can help teams use AI more effectively, while creating opportunities for knowledge and skills to flow in both directions.

When it comes to recruitment, therefore, the FRPS sector is looking for candidates who combine technological competence with critical thinking, communication, curiosity, adaptability and the ability to apply professional judgment to solve problems.

AI literacy is becoming increasingly important, but this does not simply mean knowing how to prompt a tool and blindly accepting the results. It involves people who can assess the quality of an output, challenge it where necessary, apply professional judgment and take responsibility for the final work.

A helpful way to think about using AI and technology wisely is to keep people firmly in the loop and manage risk through appropriate human oversight rather than completely handing over control to technology. That means assessing the result, challenging it when necessary and ensuring that responsibility for decisions remains with people. The objective is not to remove human judgment but instead to apply it where it adds most value.

In the future, we expect fewer roles to be centred primarily on routine task execution and greater emphasis to be placed on interpreting information, exercising judgment, managing relationships and overseeing technology. That could allow people to undertake more interesting and complex work earlier in their careers, but it also creates an important challenge for employers.

Many of the routine tasks which AI can accelerate have traditionally helped people build foundational knowledge and understand how their profession works. Firms will therefore need to think deliberately about how that experience is developed in an AI-enabled workplace, rather than assuming it will happen organically.

This is a topic that is being heavily researched. A recent World Economic Forum report, Four Futures for Jobs in the New Economy: AI and Talent in 2030, argued that employers must deliberately retain or replace development experiences that build domain knowledge, critical thinking and judgment.

It shows how global macrotrends – such as geoeconomic fragmentation, technological change, the green transition and others – are projected to create around 170 million new jobs by 2030, while displacing about 92 million existing ones. The report also demonstrates just how much uncertainty remains around the longer-term impact of AI.

Business leaders differ considerably in their expectations of whether AI will ultimately create or displace more jobs, and whether its economic benefits will be reflected in increased productivity, profitability or wages. There is, in other words, no settled view of exactly how AI will reshape the workforce or where its benefits will ultimately be felt. For financial services, the important point is that adopting AI is not simply a technology investment; it is also an investment in people and in how they learn, develop and progress.

Against that backdrop, the priority for Jersey’s financial services industry is to ensure that investment in technology is matched by investment in people. As roles evolve, firms will need to consider how they build AI literacy across their workforce while continuing to develop the technical expertise, critical thinking, professional judgment and relationship skills on which the industry depends.

That will require continued investment in upskilling and training, but also careful thought about how roles themselves are designed.

Our own research suggests that Jersey’s finance industry is approaching this transition from a position of cautious confidence, with 75% of those asked stating they did not perceive AI to be a threat. Those who did saw job security as the main threat.

The debate on AI is sometimes positioned as being either a utopia for economic productivity, or a dystopian future where robots do everything. But the reality is likely to be more nuanced: some roles will evolve, others may disappear, new capabilities will be required and we are likely to see some entirely new roles emerge.

For Jersey, the opportunity is not simply to adopt AI quickly, but to develop a workforce capable of using it well. That means combining technological capability with the deep expertise, professional judgment and relationship skills on which our finance industry has been built. If we get that balance right, AI can enhance, rather than diminish, the value that people bring to financial services.

This article was originally published in Bailiwick Express Connect magazine.