The Pension Fund of Russia is working on an AI-based solution to assist citizens in securing a larger benefit for future retirement. The head of the personnel policy department at the Pension Fund, Yulia Koryakina, spoke about the project at the sixth International Financial University Forum, Growth or Recession: Which to Expect?
The developers have been tasked with creating a proactive system that will analyze the labor market, correlate the findings with people’s current employment and advise them, if necessary, to change their job to have higher retirement benefits in the future, Yulia Koryakina explained.
The artificial intelligence-based system is expected to concentrate on Russians aged over 45 and to work in a proactive mode, that is, initiate communication and offer options for increasing the pension without request. Russians will receive their retirement recommendations through the Gosuslugi government services website.
Artificial intelligence is actually the reason why people need constant retraining and additional training in most of the existing professions, says Alexei Averkin, a researcher at the laboratory of artificial intelligence, neurotechnology and business analytics at Plekhanov Russian University of Economics. So advising a specialist on a new occupation or modernization of their old profession is a very important task.
Classic expert systems, or the so-called symbolic artificial intelligence solutions, are doing pretty well today, but a real breakthrough is impending. Data Science methods, deep learning networks and cognitive modeling methods are already changing the paradigm.
“An intellectual system based on deep learning (for instance, IBM WATSON) is able to create a very accurate psychological portrait of a client. By analyzing their brains when dealing with standard tasks, the system evaluates their skills and comprises a list of suitable jobs based on big data on the labor market. It can even forecast prospects in case a job is chosen,” Alexei Averkin said.
At the same time, there are certain concerns about the ability of AI to suggest a correct career trajectory for an employee.
“As of today, the level of AI is similar to one of a 5-6-year old, talented child: the networks can successfully recognize what products they see on a store shelf, can recognize a criminal in a video stream and forecast sales volumes. That is, they are capable of making clusters and search for features that a common for a concrete group,” said Dmitry Kostomarov, investor at EdTech and HrTech and managing partner at E-Queo.
He noted that forecasting is a far more complex task, and it seems unlikely that the proto-AI will be able to do it.
“Can it say what a person would need in terms of profession in ten years? Or what will be the highest-paying job in the future? What will be the educational targets? As of today, there are no answers to that,” Kostomarov concludes.
Head of the Russian Pension Fund Anton Drozdov said earlier that the organization was deploying AI in two areas of its activity: they created a chatbot for processing people’s applications; they also have been using AI for assessing pension rights and searching for the optimal pension solution.