Google’s Ben King confident of partnership opportunities in Malaysia and Singapore
Increasing AI investments in both Malaysia and Singapore may have an impact on some roles in the job market but Ben King is confident that Google will be able to address these challenges through the many partnerships and opportunities it has.
Since taking on his new role as Managing Director for Google Malaysia and Singapore, Ben King has been focused on processing and understanding the many partnerships that Google is involved with in both Singapore and Malaysia.
In a LinkedIn post, King mentioned that apart from overseeing the newly consolidated cluster for Singapore and Malaysia, he will also be responsible for the SEA Agency and Partner function which Google recently expanded (beyond Media Agencies) to include Creative, Creator, Tech and Platforms partner engagement.
During a recent media briefing in Malaysia, King explained that in the last few weeks in the role, he has noticed a lot of good things happening in the country. This includes the big partnerships Google has had with the Malaysian government in getting nearly half a million public sector employees to get hands on training on the latest Google Gemini tools through the Google Workspace Suite.
At the same time, he also highlighted the US$2 billion data center investment that Google has made in the country. He pointed out that there are about 160 IHLs (institute of higher learning) that are now being engaged to distribute Google career certificates as well.
“So, there's a range of partnerships in play, and there's a lot of really wonderful things that are happening today that we can build on. But what I would say is that I'm also spending some time with the teams just going very deep into what it is that we're doing, but also what it is that we want to do in the mid to long term. And that will span a range of different areas,” said King.
King explained that this includes not only looking at opportunities in the market but also what some of the challenges Google needs to overcome.
“We'll think very carefully about what our future view of partnership looks like or our partnership strategy looks like. But some amazing things are happening, and we're just going through a process of assessing what the mid-to-long term looks like. And part of that will be just making sure that we continue all that really wonderful work that's currently in play,” added King.
Addressing impact of AI on jobs
Given the increasing investments and use of AI in the region, there are also concerns on the impact the adoption of AI will have on the job market. For King, there are probably three tiers to address this situation.
First, there will definitely be some jobs that will be disrupted. For example, highly automated tasks will result in some disruption, and some jobs will go away, which is fairly accepted by most organizations.
The second tier would be how some jobs will be augmented positively by AI.
“So how do you take your day-to-day work life and really give it superpowers through AI? And I think in this particular tier, what you're going to see is people not losing their jobs to AI, but people may lose their jobs to other people who use AI better. That's really the critical headline that I would give on the second tier,” said King.
The third tier he explained is that there will be jobs that will exist in the future that society does not even know about. Put simply, there will be job creation with AI.
“When I first started at Google, some 13 to 14 years ago, an app developer didn't exist. That job didn't exist. And now we live and work in what is effectively an app-driven economy, digital economy across Southeast Asia. So, we don't know what we don't know in terms of what job creation will look like. And so that then feeds back to how do we prepare ourselves for that? That's why skilling and making sure people have the right tools is just such a fundamental agenda for us at Google,” explained King.
King believes that there is the need to equip people to be involved, to be able to capture the opportunities as they exist and be ready to capture the new roles of the future and also capture the efficiencies in their existing roles.
“Over the last 10 years, we've trained around 75 million people across APAC through our Grow with Google programs. Here in Southeast Asia, we're committed to training five and a half million more people on AI-specific skill sets. So, it's been a huge investment for us in the past and will continue to be a big investment moving into the future for this very reason that we don't know what we don't know,” said King.
“New jobs will be created. How do we give people the right tools to be able to capture them? But then also, how do they make themselves better at their current job? Because that's going to safeguard them as they move forward into their careers,” he concluded.