The third annual AI 50—Forbes’ roundup of America’s most promising artificial intelligence companies—comes after a year of accelerated adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning across all industries, spurred by a global pandemic. Rapid adoption of robots and AI automation helped keep businesses afloat while avoiding workplace-spread infections. But nearly 40 million jobs were lost while the pandemic was at its worst, and by some estimates, at last 42% won’t come back. The question of jobs—who’s lost them, whether they’ll come back and how they’re going to change—is still in question. The companies in this year’s Forbes AI50 list are full of ideas about what’s going to happen—to humans, not robots.
“Our society is understandably wary of AI, especially in an uncertain pandemic economy with record-breaking unemployment,” says Wendy Gonzalez, the CEO of Los Gatos, California-based digital training platform Sama, which counts Google, Walmart and Nvidia among its customers. “With that in mind, we believe it’s imperative for companies in the space not only to address AI applications but reassure their employees, communities and society of the opportunities the technology can create.”
Like Gonzalez, other founders acknowledged the legitimacy of these societal concerns, and directed responsibility to executives. “It starts with corporate accountability and responsibility,” says Jason Lopatecki, the CEO of Arize AI, an analytics platform that oversees deployed AI in real-time. “Companies that invest heavily in machine learning and AI need to be intentional about how they leverage this tool to enhance the lives of their customers, employees, communities, and society at large.”
As far as enhancing the lives of employees goes, founders were enthusiastic about upskilling—essentially, helping employees to learn new skills so that they can work with, or outpace, automation. “In the long run automation will create more jobs, not fewer. But in the short run, our biggest bet to prevent the effects of automation on the unemployed and the economy is to create upskilling programs,” says Ezra—whose AI helps radiologists more effectively detect cancer lesions—CEO Emi Gal.
He lauds programs like Amazon’s Upskilling 2025—for which the e-commerce giant has pledged $700 million over six years to provide training to 100,000 employees—and the Lambda School, an ed-tech platform with a compelling tuition-share model. Still, Gal says “we need every single employer in the world to invest in upskilling their employees.” Governments can also do or support this by offering tax credits for workforce retraining, as a proposal introduced last May would have done.
Other AI 50-listers have more direct approaches to job creation, targeting areas where workforce shortages were already in place. Canvas, a San Francisco-based robotics company creates machines that tag-team with humans to expedite the process of drywall finishing; FarmWise, another robotics company in the Bay Area develops precision weeders that fill in where a variety of factors have caused labor scarcity in the agriculture industry. “The pandemic has worsened an already troubling situation and fully revealed to the world the fragility of our food production system,” says FarmWise CEO Sebastien Boyer, pointing to a 2019 USDA report that alleged that “the farm labor market shows many signs of tightening.” The same goes for the construction industry, where the pandemic has only worsened already persistent workforce shortages.
Still, Canvas CEO Kevin Albert believes that more can be done, regardless of the circumstances of the industry, pointing again to employers’ responsibility to rise to the occasion and train their employees about how the world is changing. “Too often, I think the national conversation misses the risk that we as a society aren’t doing enough to train people for the jobs that are being created to meet the labor demand,” Albert says. “The gap here is that we have to train people for the new jobs we are creating.”
There are also whole industries that never existed before, or at least not so robustly, like the world of creators that AI company Narrativ—which helps creators attract customers by partnering with online reviewers who then reference them—serves. “The pandemic has certainly been devastating for many sectors, but it’s proven to be a catalyst for the creator economy,” says CEO Li Haslett Chan. “More than 50 million people have emerged as part of this massive workforce, but 95% of them don’t earn enough to pay rent.” During the pandemic, Narrativ has doubled in size, and says that its workforce is 60% people of color and 42% female.
“For all the jobs that may potentially be eliminated by AI, inevitably, a whole new sector will rise up,” says Chris Mansi, the CEO of Viz.ai, which uses technology to get stroke victims critical treatment sooner. “People have to know how to use the information you’re giving them, and with the adoption of AI we need people to manage the implementation and then support users of that artificial intelligence.”
