Your job is not threatened by AI. Your job is threatened by people who can collaborate with AI

We have published several articles in the past about human-assisted AI and the enduring demand for customs declarants that are hard to come by. Today, I want to talk about psychology and the human tendency to cling to habits. It is my opinion that if you are afraid today that AI poses a threat to your job, you don’t need to be. AI is just a new technology and only those clinging to the past may rightfully feel threatened. Allow me to make that point crystal clear. 

First, let’s step into the timemachine together. Can you still imagine what an office looked like 30 years ago? Fax machines, (electric) typewriters, perpetually humming photocopiers, overflowing filing cabinets, pneumatic tube mail, desks with calculators and pens, the large archive in the basement and of course the ever-present sweet scent of toner and coffee, probably even intertwined with the smell of cigarettes and old ashtrays.

Do you remember the colleagues who fiercely resisted the advent of PCs, word processors, Excel, and email? Can you imagine creating tables with a pen, a ruler, and paper and manually totaling data?

In my first job, I was confronted with such a manual process. My colleague received information from insurance companies sharing a common risk through reports (referred to as bordereaux). To check whether the total premium and commission wages were correct, everything was manually checked off, differences noted in notebooks, and letters written requesting corrections. This process was repeated every month and it was a full-time job. Can you imagine someone doing that today?

In a similar vein, the preparation work for a customs declaration has also evolved significantly. The latest evolutions, to which we gladly contribute with our AI-based software, focus on lowering the ‘cognitive load’ of that preparation work. Just as pen and paper may seem antique to you now, a new generation will look at how we used to manually type things into Excel to then create a pivot table that we neatly typed into our declaration software and think “who can even work that way?”.

That new generation is not arriving in 10 years, it is blossoming now. So why not embrace this technology? It's not perfect and needs you to check for any errors made or to supplement things. It will significantly reduce your workload and you will have much less stress about making a typo. Above all, you get more time to really add value, namely more time for quality control and customer service.

If you are afraid that AI poses a threat to your job, you don’t need to be. AI is just a new technology and only those clinging to the past and the time of yore may rightfully feel threatened.

And you want some more good news? The way software is created today is vastly different from 30 years ago. The threshold to get started with a tool like Customaite is very low. You don’t need to know anything about AI at all. Anyone who can handle Instagram or Facebook can also easily work with Customaite. Besides, our team is here to help you learn the tool step by step and to share all the useful tricks with you.


Want to know more? You can contact us through our website or simply send me a message on LinkedIn.