Hear me out, you'll see why this is worth looking into.
First, let's talk about the gig economy. I have written about my distaste for Uber's business model and how it is driving many of its partners but really employees to go bankrupt if they work full-time hours for them or longer. Since my article, many more videos have popped up about people going through a whole day of Uber or Uber eats on weekdays and weekends and showing their earnings before and after their daily expenses. Needless to say, it was cringe inducing! Nevertheless, the gig economy is a weird sector that's here to stay. Oh, and the types of umbrella companies bringing gig people together are rising! There are gig companies for retail and hospitality occasional shift work, dog walking and so much more. Of particular interest to our topic, however, are companies like Fiverr and Canva. They are huge, wealthy platforms for "creative types"- actors, videographers, photographers, graphical designers and much, much more. These companies rely on the gig economy to connect businesses with talented people, or they buy off their creative work and make it available for a flat rate or on a per use basis. Why does this matter? Well, it matters because it's the creative materials and marketing campaigns that put a business on the map, create a brand help its recognition and recall among the target market. Most businesses will never become household names and will remain forever interchangeable with their competitors. Therefore, your image and how you stand out are everything in the current landscape. What these big companies, which I would call gig barons (rubber barons? haha), are in fact doing is offering small businesses in many sectors the tools of an entire marketing department at their fingertips and on a tight budget. This effectively levels the playing field between haves and have nots of the business world in many situations. Now, a small business can have the owner connect with the gig barons and get an affordable, on-demand marketing department! Also, it means that mid-size businesses can have a marketing specialist who is essentially a one person department thanks to this amazing option. What does this do to the creative types? You may think it cheapens their creative genius. However, I'd say the job market is showing that many creatives out there have the creative, but not the genius part. Creativity cannot be quantified or boiled down to a science, but it's still possible to see who's a genius and who isn't. The geniuses will go on to huge companies with enough money to pay them to create amazing things. Everyone else will gig their way into the likes of Fiverr or Canva, or start their own business. The rest will opt for a career shift which will hopefully take them beyond retail and call centers (nothing wrong with those- if you have no student loans to pay back for your arts diploma...). So, gig barons get creative types on the cheap, creative types get one more shot before donning the green apron. It's gig economy all right, even though it has a decidedly different feel from Uber.
Now how does this connect with AI solutions? Really well, as it turns out. So, you have a product or a service, you have a cheap on-demand marketing department, your business might have a physical location or be based online (either way, you factored those costs in), and now you have to advertise, do accounting, track expenses etc. Well, what's starting to happen, and this is what I'm hearing from advertising types I know, is that a lot of the software solutions they use are beginning to offer AI assistance to a varying degree. For example, there are solutions that automatically generate reports and offer insights, constantly learning based on how you react to them. Then, you have bots and they are extremely important. For example, more and more business and public persona Facebook pages have their own bots that handle many customer inquiries for which you really don't need a human being at all. Google is coming up with your own personal secretary, which will learn the more people use it to make calls, schedule stuff and so on. Sure, all of those services need your supervision, but they need less and less babysitting, which cannot be always said for employees.
Bottom line, the more your business can rely on software that automates reports, insights, repetitive tasks and decreases the number of employees, and the more gig barons come onto the scene, the more people will opt to leverage this wealth of cheaper support services to start their own businesses. Yes, you need to be business minded. Yes, you need tons of skills. Yes, it's still a slow start getting a business off the ground. However, it is now a very attractive proposition. If it works out, you become your own boss and you're profitable. If it doesn't work out, you don't have to declare bankruptcy because you didn't have to take out a huge loan just to test things out! In a country with rising household debt, the last thing you'd want to do to yourself and others is to be another 500K failed business idea.
So, while I'm still cautious about AI and the gig economy, I am happy to say that it looks like it'll pull many of North America's educated poor out of the precariat class and into working in their field- either as increasingly favorable gigs or as small business owners. I truly hope that's the case, because the business landscape, such as it currently is, has failed many such people and no other solution is on the horizon.
Thoughts? :)