Be ready for the twists and turns of AI

The only certainty right now is that we are in a period of flux. Even if AI development stood still, it would still be years before we fully understood how this technology will reshape hiring.

But AI isn’t standing still. Research and development is only accelerating, and the way we use these tools a year from now will look very different from today.

All of which adds up to a real hiring conundrum. How do you plan ahead when even the companies leading AI development don’t fully know where their work will take them in the next 12 months?

As a business leader, you could take a guess, but you could easily end up this time next year with an unbalanced team and a lot of wasted investment.

The smarter answer is to lean on interim services.

There are thousands of highly qualified professionals in the freelance and consultant communities who can fill gaps now, helping businesses respond to immediate demands while staying ready for an uncertain future.

Fraud, for example

Fraud detection is one key area where AI is becoming embedded in payments ecosystems. Machine learning tools can often spot the telltale signs of a fraudulent transaction faster than a human, and algorithms can assess huge volumes of transactions at speed to flag suspicious patterns.

That’s fantastic, but it has become very difficult to know how much human intervention is still needed. In other words: how much can you trust an AI system to detect fraud?

Short of a major incident where law enforcement or a regulator flags something your business missed, there’s very little way of knowing what your AI model isn’t catching.

That’s before you factor in global compliance. Payments firms are typically international, covering a wide range of countries, and each jurisdiction has its own rules on what level of automation in fraud detection is acceptable.

Regulators tend to be a step or two behind the business community when it comes to understanding new technology, but they are now catching up with the growing use of AI. That means the rules will change and evolve considerably over the coming years.

So humans clearly need to be somewhere in the picture. But how many, and at what level?

There’s no single answer. The needs of one country or business may differ from another, and the answer a year from now may be different from the answer today.

The virtue of interim hiring is that it lets you solve these challenges in the short term without making mistakes that come back to bite you in the long term.

Experienced anti-fraud specialists can be brought in now to help monitor and train AI systems, even if those systems no longer need that level of oversight a year from now. Alternatively, a fraud scandal linked to AI monitoring could prompt a national or EU-level regulator to demand human involvement at every step of the process.

Interim hiring leaves you ready for either outcome.

It’s also very hard to predict which areas of your business AI will be deployed in next, so expect the next big wave of automation to catch you by surprise.

Interim staff are ideal for one-off projects like these. Parachuting in an AI expert to get systems up and running is a perfect use of short to medium-term contractors.

Once things are running smoothly, you don’t need an AI specialist on hand around the clock. But deploying these systems and training them properly is highly skilled work that your existing team is unlikely to be equipped for.

Hiring smart

PaymentGenes has a network of thousands of tech professionals ready to step into interim roles just like these.

Our recruitment team is constantly headhunting highly qualified talent, and has the industry knowledge and consultancy credentials to make sure the right people are placed in the right roles within your business.

Get in touch with PaymentGenes today to discuss your business needs and find the right person to deliver on your most urgent projects.