The head of tech at Credit Suisse gives her best advice for workers losing their jobs to robots

Elderly with robot

Business Insider talked to Laura Barrowman, the chief technology officer at Credit Suisse, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Monday.
Barrowman said workers whose jobs have been displaced by automation should shift their careers towards cybersecurity, where there is a talent shortage.

Having your job displaced by a robot might not mean you're completely out of work.

Laura Barrowman, the chief technology officer at Credit Suisse, said workers who have lost their jobs due to automation still hold valuable knowledge about the business that can be leveraged in other areas, such as cybersecurity.

"What we need to do is take those people that we are removing the jobs from and train them around cyber," Barrowman told Business Insider on Monday during an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "Cyber is not just about the technical skills ... it is about the knowledge of the organization. You cannot protect something if you don't know how it works."

Cybersecurity is both a technology and a business problem, she said. So there's a need for those with expertise working on the tech and business side to work together.

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A Capgemini report found that financial services could see a $512 billion boost in revenue by 2020 through the use of intelligence automation. That includes using everything from robotic automation processing (RPA), artificial intelligence, and business process optimization to help with high-volume, repeatable, and rule-based tasks.

Barrowman's call for employees to re-shift focus towards cybersecurity comes at a time when the space is in serious need of it.

"Globally, if you look at cyber skills, I think it is a deficit," Barrowman said. "It is such a shortage of skills, and you need people who have that capability."

Credit Suisse currently runs educational programs to retrain employees to they can use their skills within the cyber space. Barrowman said employees can also provide value by helping with the maintenance of the very technology that displaced their jobs: artificial intelligence.

A focus area of the bank is around ensuring the high quality of data fed into AI tools, something humans can help with. For an AI-based tool to be efficient, the data it analyzes needs to be complete and accurate. While that might seem like a basic request, Barrowman said it's a critical one and not easily achievable in a company the size of Credit Suisse.

"Anything that is wrong, if the AI is calculating on it, the AI is wrong by definition," Barrowman said. "Making sure that your basics are really good. I think is a fundamental for everything. And you know, with big corporations it is hard to get your basics right."

If a company is able to create consistencies across the data sets that sit within its organization, the opportunities for what AI can do at Wall Street firms are huge," Barrowman said. Being able to analyze data from multiple different sources will provide banks revenue opportunities they might not have realized previously.

"Using AI to give clients information around what they could use as a product is so much better than sifting through and assuming an RM [relationship manager] has read or been able to read all of the documentation coming through," Barrowman said. "I don't even think we have started to scratch the surface of the capability for what this could do."

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