Is AI after your job?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more and more prominent in everyday life and the technology is improving at an incredible rate. Whether you use AI to draft a piece of writing, to plan your weekly shop or to make cute cat animations, one thing’s for sure, AI is here to stay. Today however, we’re looking at AI in the workplace. From menial and mundane tasks to advanced engineering, AI will change the world of structural engineering. Therefore, the question is, will there still be a role for the human engineer or will AI make the profession redundant?
Where are you now ?
At what stage would you currently place yourself on the following index designed by Atlassian?
0 No AI usage
1 basic AI tools – simple tasks like grammar checks or data entry.
2 AI as a Personal Assistant – AI is automating repetitive tasks, improving efficiency and reducing workload.
3 AI as a Creative Partner – AI is used for brainstorming, decision-making and ideation.
4 AI as a Strategic Collaborator – AI is fully integrated into strategy, leadership and innovation.
A quick poll in the JPS office suggests that most of our engineers would place themselves on the lower end of the scale at present. Here are some of the ways in which our engineers are currently using, or have been exposed to AI technology in the workplace:
Meeting bot/ note taker: AI Notetakers transcribe meetings and create actions from the content. Our engineers have been in meetings with these AI note takers but have questions about their usefulness.
Summarising Reports: AI is being used to good effect by some of our engineers to summarise and quickly find information in reports.
Drafting emails and reports: AI can help with drafting reports or emails but is only useful as a first draft. The need for a human eye for sense checking is still there.
How will AI change the role of the engineer?
Efficiency ✔️
Personability ❌
Ingenuity ❌
In the field of structural engineering, AI will eventually replace all the tasks requiring logical thought. It will produce calculations, run finite element analysis models and write reports, so what is left for the engineer to do?
The good news is that despite how well AI can perform in machine learning tasks, it will never be able to replicate the reassurance that comes from a professional with years of experience. It’s easy to see how AI will eventually replace all logical workstreams but it’s more difficult to imagine a world where clients place faith in a machine. The oversight of an experienced human engineer who can add their ingenuity and creative problem solving to a project will remain invaluable.
Here at JPS we pride ourselves on offering excellent service built around our 3 core values: efficiency, ingenuity and personability. Whilst we are happy to let AI take over time consuming tasks and run calculations while we’re on our lunch break, AI can’t replace the qualities of a good structural engineer.
What do you think? Will the machine eventually take over or will AI highlight the human qualities that make some engineer excel with or without AI? Let us know your thoughts. Are you team AI? How do you use AI creatively? Are Structural Engineers’ jobs safe? Please leave us a comment:
