The choice isn’t between AI and humans, employers say

AI won’t (necessarily) take your job, but someone who’s better at using AI might. That was the message from Egyptian employers at the Cairo ICT conference on Tuesday. “The real competition will be between a human and another human using AI, and how effectively they use it,” Sameh Mahboub (LinkedIn), Egypt site general manager at Dell Technologies, said.

Just using ChatGPT isn’t a skill anymore: Employers want to see what candidates have built with AI and how it connects to the business, Mahboub said.

For example: Konecta, a global customer service outsourcing company, likes to test whether job candidates can catch AI’s mistakes, especially answers that just don’t make sense, said Nour Youssef (LinkedIn), the company’s MEA HR head.

The risk: Some staff use AI “to stop thinking,” warned Nour Abd Eldayem (LinkedIn), AI and transformation lead at Liquid C2, calling it “skill atrophy.”

The upside: The climb from junior to senior staff has shrunk from four to five years to “a year or a year and a half,” said Dr. Salwa Zaki (LinkedIn), data and AI lead at Noventiq.

Some employers aren’t waiting for graduates to figure AI out. Dell gives students a year to build real AI projects through a program with the communications and higher education ministries. More than 2.7k students and 763 projects have gone through it since 2022, the State Information Service says.

MEANWHILE- AI is getting expensive for banks. Banks around the world are trying to rein in the soaring cost of AI agents, the bots that can do tasks on their own, McKinsey says in its annual banking review. Part of the problem is that agents “communicate with each other,” so the costs “quickly add up,” McKinsey’s Vik Sohoni told Reuters. Spending on them could easily hit 20% of what banks pay their staff, the review says.