It’s a question many businesses and their employees have had in mind, ever since the global boom of artificial intelligence tools that promise to shift nearly every aspect of work and life: What if the robot replaces me?

For the Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School, the AI revolution is particularly pertinent. Founded in 2004, PALCS is a virtual K-12 cyber school.

“Our goal — and it’s in our name — is that leadership piece,” said Courtney Kofeldt-Grove, director of teaching, learning and innovation. “We do really want to prepare our students for the future, and AI literacy is becoming essential.

“Students need to understand not only how to use these tools, but when not to use them, and how to question their output, and how to recognize [that] their own thinking needs to lead those conversations.”

Training started with the school’s staff in 2024 after coming back from Christmas break, Kofeldt-Grove said, when AI tools including ChatGPT became mainstream. Not only did the teachers have to learn what it meant for their own jobs, but how AI would potentially impact their students’ futures.

“We don’t really know the jobs that our students will encounter because that is rapidly evolving every day,” she said. “One thing that’s durable and will stand (the test of) time is thinking critically, the ability to adapt, to communicate, and create good decisions when technology changes.”

As for the teachers themselves, job security is “something that comes to mind immediately,” she said.

When suddenly students can turn in something AI generated and teachers can grade with AI, the landscape of education is essentially changed. She said the teacher’s focus necessarily shifted from the end product to the student’s process, bringing in AI as a “thought partner.” Think first. AI second.

“But I am confident in saying the most valuable parts of our work in education are deeply human,” Kofeldt-Grove said. “Where it may change some of those tasks that our teachers perform, it won’t replace the need for someone who knows a child, recognizes when they’re struggling, challenges their thinking and helps them grow.”

She said the “blended intelligence” between student, machine and teacher can benefit the learning process. And the teacher-student relationship is an opportunity to develop those “soft skills that they’ll take with them forever, no matter the field that they go into. How are they communicating? How are they expressing their creativity and critically thinking?”

When it comes to the world of insurance, the terrain changes, but much of the AI strategy remains the same.

GBU Life, a 134-year-old member-owned nonprofit life insurance organization based in Brentwood, is in the midst of testing artificial intelligence tools.

“We don’t think about AI as a headcount strategy,” said Wil Lombardi, chief operating officer. “We look at it as a capacity or capability strategy.”

“For us, the future isn’t humans versus AI. It’s increasingly going to be how AI assists our employees. It’s going to be the people who know how to effectively use AI working differently than the people who don’t.”

For a document and data-heavy industry, the technology can be game-changing. But Lombardi said that while efficiency does matter in the industry, “Trust matters more.”

GBU is heavy on training its employees to “kick the tires” with different AI tools, and test them in a controlled lab environment where data is protected on their computers.

Employees are encouraged to give feedback and brainstorm how to best incorporate the technology, and Lombardi says GBU is not afraid to eliminate AI when it’s not working.

“We’re not there to be on the cutting edge. We don’t chase hype. The beauty of being a private, member-owned not-for-profit — we don’t have to chase the quarterly earnings. … We don’t have to chase Wall Street.”

Still, employee concerns surrounding job security is something Lombardi said he can’t walk past or dismiss as a leader.

“AI will change the way work happens,” he said. “But it’s an assist, not a replacement. The phrase I use for my employees is, ‘AI won’t replace you. The person who understands AI may.’ ”

Kevin Heher, president of Liberty Insurance Agency, said his team has only used artificial intelligence more since talking with the Post-Gazette last fall.

Liberty employees jump between Microsoft’s Copilot, Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, finding strengths across them for different tasks and different people. Heher said Claude has had the biggest direct impact when it comes to data entry.

“Wow, something that we used to spend 40 hours a month doing is now taking an hour or less,” he said.

In the short term, Heher is focusing on AI enhancing human work, but he said the mid to long term is a guessing game.

“There’s no doubt that the technology is going to have an impact on pretty much every industry and almost every position inside the industry,” Heher said. “I think that everybody in their working lives should be thinking about how they can integrate AI to make their daily life more fun, do the things that they like to do, and make it easier, more accurate.”

For GBU’s Lombardi, much of that onus falls on leadership.

“Our responsibility as leaders is to prepare our workforce for that change, build new capabilities, and use the technology thoughtfully, not simply chase automation or staff replacement or employee replacement for automation’s sake,” Lombardi said. “That’s the worst thing to do.”

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