Every article that focuses on how AI is impacting the modern workforce centres around white-collar workers. We asked Ryan Stokes, SGH CEO – whose companies include the likes of Westrac, Boral and Coates – what AI looks like for his workers and how it’s actually being used in primary industries.
Stokes spoke to Peter Switzer about his businesses using AI on this week’s Switzer Show.
Stokes says that for his businesses, WesTrac, Coates and Boral, it’s pretty clear that AI has its limits.
“Our businesses are very physically intensive businesses. And you’re not going to replace that in an automated way any time soon,” he said.
Instead of digging holes and building infrastructure, however, Stokes said that he sees AI as the support role that makes all of that physical work possible. The kind of stuff that’s unglamorous by design: the paperwork and processes.
“How can we better support our customer engagement, our customer processes, and make that more efficient and help drive sales and efficiencies, as well as what can we do on a productivity side to actually streamline processes that are repeatable and leverage some of the technologies there.”
“It is in that, I’d say, process aspect that we probably see the greatest opportunity, defining and then automating some of those.”
The same logic applies across the group’s media interests, he said, “but for us, the bigger opportunities [are] in the industrials.”
No AI ‘big bang’
So is AI set to replace all of SGH’s admin teams then? Stokes says no, adding that his people’s experience is more valuable.
“I don’t think there’s necessarily this big bang change of the workforce, but I think it is an element where a lot of repeatable processes are put through automation,” he said. The point, as he framed it, is freeing human time to be applied elsewhere, not removing the humans.
The skills that matter are shifting with it. “Where you have depth of experience and tenure, the value of that is there. But the real requirement is understanding of the core processes and then trying to actually streamline processes that are using our time and labour inefficiently.”
Switzer offered his own experience, that working with AI “actually makes you ask better questions”, and Stokes took the national angle to close.
“We need to continue to find ways to be more productive and more efficient across our businesses. But as a nation, I think some of these technology opportunities will help us along that journey.”
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