In his latest book, The AI Advantage, Thomas Davenport explains how almost any organization — whatever its size and nature may be — can become productively and profitably involved in the artificial intelligence “revolution.”

He suggests that augmentation — smart humans working in smart collaboration with smart machines — is by far more likely to have wider and deeper impact than large-scale automation is. Why? He offers five reasons:

“First, as some of the automation research cited suggests, AI tends to support or automate tasks, not entire jobs …A second reason augmentation is more likely is that surveys suggest that most managers neither want nor expect large-scale automation…A third factor automation is less likely than augmentation is that people find new jobs and tasks to perform when previous tasks are taken over by automation...A fifth and final reason massive job loss is not a concern is that a lot of entirely new jobs will be created.”

All this is explained in much greater detail in Chapter 6, Pages 133-137.

Today, many workers fear that machines will be taking their jobs. Scribes certainly worried about that after they heard about the printing press, and others later also worried about steam powered transportation, the McCormick reaper, mass production assembly lines, the telephone, the internet, and wireless electronics. Over the decades, machines have out-produced humans and at a fraction of the cost of their labor.

In months and years to come, there will be no shortage of jobs for those who can collaborate productively and profitably with machines. They will have a competitive advantage, an AI Advantage.