This content is produced by The Australian Financial Review in commercial partnership with the Australian Computer Society.

Depending on who you believe, technology is going to automate and destroy more than 50 per cent of all jobs or it is going to usher in a new age or new wave of careers.

The real answer lies somewhere in between. In fact, the things that really need to worry about their jobs are the current generation of robot technology because they will be superseded, but they cannot think for themselves … or can they?

The recent The Automation Advantage report commissioned by Google and conducted by AlphaBeta found automation presents a $2.2 trillion opportunity for the Australian economy and could potentially create millions of jobs.

The report found Australia lags behind the rest of the world with only 9 per cent of listed companies making sustained investments in automation, compared with more than 20 per cent in the United States and nearly 14 per cent in leading automation nations globally.

According to the report, if Australia accelerated its automation uptake, it would stand to gain up to another $1 trillion over the next 15 years.

The report also found only 29 per cent of automation-driven workplace change will involve workers changing jobs. Of this 29 per cent, automation will likely create new jobs for those displaced workers. In fact, if anything, the report suggests automation will be like previous periods of technological advancement and there will be a wave of new jobs created.

Yet while the potential is strong, Australia really needs to move quickly if we want to be globally competitive in the digital age. What it will take is a concerted and combined effort from government, the corporate sector, education providers and trade unions to prepare people for the automation age.

Education and retraining

Part of that preparation involves ensuring people receive the right type of education and retraining. This might mean more of a focus on the science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines, but it also means making people aware of the breadth of AI's potential.

Speaking at the recent AI roundtable co-hosted by The Australian Financial Review and the Australian Computer Society, IBM Research's vice president and lab director Joanna Batstone said AI was not just about transforming traditional computer science-based technology industries, "it's already starting to have an impact in the creative industries".

"People are using AI natural language processing techniques to write poetry, to write music, to analyse patterns in music to create movie trailers by doing visual recognition," Batstone said.

 She said we can inspire people about the skill sets we will need in the future by showing the opportunities AI affords.

"Showing that it can transform movies, theatre, poetry and art is just as important as showing how it can transform computer science."

Yet while it is easy to motivate the next generation about automation, fellow roundtable participant Ed Husic who is the shadow minister for employment services, workforce participation, future of work and the digital economy, warned there is a large cohort of workers worried about their future.

He said a huge number of jobs will be affected and we are not having the right conversations about how we are going to "reskill" those people.

"We're going to have to," Husic said. "We really need to work out how we do that. The challenge is we have a cohort of people in the middle who were trained up with the belief that if they went to school, TAFE or university and picked up a bunch of skills, they would be in a job. They knew if they changed jobs, the new job would pretty much involve the same skill set all the way through.

"Now, they're going to be doing all these different roles which require different skills, so how do we improve the ability to acquire skills in a shorter space of time so people will be able to get the next job?"

Lifelong learning

According to Joanna Batstone and other roundtable participants, it comes down to the notion of lifelong learning which is easier said than done.

"As the world moves to AI, we have to retrain and reskill our own workforce. It has to be a focus on learning, skilling, retraining and educating and bringing your workforce, your community along," she said.

For Batstone, this will require new learning styles, techniques and technologies. It will mean more personalised learning, or as roundtable participant Dr Ian Oppermann suggested, "micro-credentials".

Oppermann who is the CEO of the NSW Data Analytics Centre, said vocational education will not need to be acquired in the traditional manner of a university or TAFE, it could be a whole series of micro-credentials or courses delivered to an individual.

Interestingly, Michael Blumenstein, who is the head of school, software in the Faculty of Engineering and IT at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) said universities are already embracing micro-credentialling especially in post-graduate studies.

"People want flexibility and they know something's coming and they want to change," Blumenstein said. "They want to upskill, but they don't have the time to do it.  So, this micro-credentialling can actually be used as a way to actually do little things over time at your discretion, whenever you want, but then pack it together to actually give a qualification that's recognised."

Opperman pointed out one place where AI is already playing a role in planning for the future is in the TAFE system in New South Wales. He said AI is currently reading every TAFE course description in the state and also reading every job ad online in all of Australia and it is looking at where the skills are needed.

"It's doing a simple supply and demand match through the NSW Data Analytics Centre," he said. "We're looking at where we've got over or underinvestment and looking at the trends of jobs in the regions.

"Furthermore, we're also looking at course compositions and asking how could you take this bit of a course and put it into another course? It means creating little sub-sections of courses, an eight-hour part of a TAFE course."

The point of doing this is to create the micro-credentials people will need. The flexibility we will need to prosper in the future.