Artificial Intelligence is transforming traditional business models and revolutionizing the modern business landscape.
AI-driven automations, tools, and workflows simplify many day-to-day tasks that people perform in the workplace. By properly harnessing the power of AI, employees, managers, and even leaders can save time and increase productivity. AI in the workplace frees workers from the burdens of many day-to-day repetitive tasks so they can do more meaningful work, which according to HBR, is something that matters more to people than flexibility and growth opportunities. They can also focus on more important tasks where they can utilize their uniquely human capabilities to make the maximum positive impact on the organization.
Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google has said that “AI is not about replacing humans, it’s about augmenting human capabilities”. And in doing so, it has led to the formation of what IBM calls an “augmented workforce” that has the potential to deliver immense and exponential value to any business. No wonder the World Economic Forum (WEF) predicts that AI will disrupt 85 million jobs globally between 2020 and 2025!
Clearly, AI is here to stay.
And if used right, it can generate immense benefits for your business.
So how can YOU, a smart, future-focused business leader leverage the power of AI to benefit your company?
What do you need to do to ensure your firm’s growth and success in an automated, AI-driven world?
And equally important, how can you use AI responsibly and ethically in your business?
Read on to discover the answers to these business-critical questions.
#1. Do a self-assessment of your AI needs
AI can help your employees to work faster and smarter.
And by automating many manual, time-consuming processes, it can help your business operate more strategically and compete better in the marketplace.
But there’s a catch – you need to apply AI in the right processes and for the right tasks.
The tasks that are best-suited for AI satisfy one of these conditions:
- They are repetitive, tedious, and time-consuming
- They require high computational speed and fast processing
- They require large datasets to ensure that the output produced is relevant and accurate
- They require the recognition of patterns, humans, or objects
- They are prone to human error if done manually
AI also shines in scenarios where you need to predict future outcomes based on historical data, translate or generate text, and identify anomalies that may often be missed by humans.
Do any tasks in your organisation fall into these categories?
To find out, do a self-assessment!
Here are some questions to consider:
- Do you frequently need to condense lengthy blocks of text like reports or articles into concise summaries?
- Or perhaps your marketing team is looking to create marketing emails, social media posts, and other types of content for new campaigns?
- Maybe you want to detect suspicious or potentially fraudulent activities?
- How about streamlining your existing software development process or performing complex financial calculations at high speeds?
The bottomline is that your company likely has very specific objectives that can be met with AI.
Think about what you do and how you currently do it to determine where AI will best fit within your business milieu.
Only then should you invest in AI tools to redesign the work and employees’ workflows.
A detailed self-assessment will make it easier to get from “what is” to “what should be”. It will also enable you to identify the right tools for your processes and avoid wasting money on the wrong tools.
#2. Invest in talent, not just in technology
If AI augments human skills, won’t it allow you to reduce human resource costs?
If yes, shouldn’t you invest more in AI models, algorithms, and tools?
And why should you invest in talent?
It sounds counterintuitive, but the truth is: in the age of AI, investing in human talent is even more important than investing in technology.
Earlier we mentioned how the WEF predicts that technologies will disrupt millions of jobs globally by the end of 2025. But that’s not all. According to the WEF, AI will also create 97 million new job roles in the coming years, necessitating the need for companies to hire more people, not less.
Furthermore, humans will retain their comparative advantage over AI in all of the following areas:
- Tasks that involve managing, advising, decision-making, reasoning, communicating and interacting with others
- Green economy jobs
- Job roles in engineering, cloud computing, and product development
Employees who fit the bill in these areas will remain in high demand despite the growing prevalence of AI in the workplace. Jobs that require high levels of emotional and social intelligence, creativity, strategic thinking, leadership, and complex problem-solving will also be less susceptible to replacement by AI-driven automation.
Which of these jobs exist in your organisation? Which specific human skills matter to your business?
The answer to these questions will help guide your workforce planning and design strategy in the age of AI.
As you plan your augmented workforce, make an effort to understand where people fit into it and where they will intersect with AI. Then take steps to:
- Hire the right talent to address skills shortages
- Invest time and money in training and reskilling existing employees
- Deprioritise skills and specialities that are no longer relevant to your AI-driven organisation
- If outright downsizing the workforce is not an option, reorganise it and redeploy workers (shift people into new roles, merge roles)
Saadia Zahidi, Managing Director of the WEF recently said that “In the future, we will see the most competitive businesses are the ones that have invested heavily in their human capital”. If you invest in the right talent and act now to boost your employees’ skills and competencies, you will see great results for your company in the AI era.
#3. Get employee buy-in
The potential benefits of AI to companies are already well-known.
But what about AI’s impact on employees? What do workers really think about AI?
Well, according to the Freshworks 2024 AI Workplace Report, 72%of workers trust that AI will bring value to their work processes. Even many senior employees (80%) believe that AI will prove its business impact within just two years. Furthermore, 70% of workers want to develop their AI skills to stay marketable. These findings show that in recent years, employees’ opinions and perceptions of AI have shifted in a more positive direction.
But the positivity is not uniform.
Several AI experts believe that AI will never completely replace people. If anything, it is the people who use AI that will replace the people who don’t.
Even so, negative employee attitudes towards AI continue to persist, with many employees worldwide worrying that AI will replace them or even make them redundant.
One 2024 survey of nearly 35,000 private-sector workers in 18 countries highlighted worker’s worries regarding AI. Unsurprisingly, a majority of them – 85% – believe that AI will impact their jobs within the next two to three years. However, not all of them believe that the impact will be wholly positive. In fact, only 43% think that AI will help them. Another 42% think that AI could have a detrimental impact on their jobs and careers by replacing at least some of their existing functions. Moreover, only 45% of the latter group believe that they have the skills they will need to advance in their careers in an AI-driven world of work.
If you are planning to implement AI tools within the company, it’s important to acknowledge these realities.
Then take the pulse of your employees.
Find out: What is their attitude towards AI?
Is it positive, negative, or neutral?
Are they prepared for the changes that AI will bring to their processes and workflows?
What are they worried about?
Once you gain an understanding into these critical issues, you can determine what you need to do to ease your people’s concerns and convert then to the company’s AI cause. You can explain the potential of AI to support their work, help them save time, and boost their productivity and efficiency. Doing so will help you to create enthusiasm and interest in AI and get their buy-in for the firm’s AI pivot.
Here are some other ways to enthuse employees and generate a more positive outlook towards AI:
- Ask them which of their tasks could be automated to make their jobs easier
- Get their opinions and feedback about AI technologies that could be relevant to the business
- Provide useful resources and training to help them learn more about AI capabilities
- Appoint an “AI Ambassador” who will share their AI knowledge, address employee questions and concerns, promote AI use, and foster a culture of AI experimentation, innovation, and adoption
#4. Set up a Responsible AI ecosystem
Back in 2015, the eCommerce giant Amazon discovered a big problem in their AI-enabled recruitment tool: it did not like women. The tool automatically reviewed job applicants’ resumes and provided insights about the “best” candidates. The problem? The best candidates, at least according to the tool, were all men.
The tool didn’t assess resumes in a gender-neutral way. Simply put, it taught itself that male candidates were preferable and ignored female candidates – even if they were the right person for a particular job. This issue of gender-based discrimination – perpetrated by an inanimate tool, no less! – embarrassed Amazon, who ultimately, apologised and scrapped the tool.
More importantly, it highlighted the issue of inherent AI bias, raising concerns about increasing reliance on AI tools for different business use cases. The biases that result in serious mistakes are themselves are the result of the data on which the AI is trained. For example, Amazon’s tool was trained on male resumes so it ended up being biased towards male candidates.
Unfortunately, discrimination is just one of the problems related to AI. AI systems can also generate incorrect conclusions when exposed to new data patterns (a phenomenon known as “brittle AI”), forget previously learned information which can hinder system performance and output (a phenomenon known as “catastrophic forgetting”), and even lead to privacy breaches if the data being used is not properly safeguarded.
If your company’s AI systems are prone to any of these weaknesses, it can create operational inefficiencies and workplace disruptions. If left unaddressed, problems like bias and discrimination can also damage your firm’s reputation and lead to legal action from regulators or clients.
So how can you avoid these issues?
What can you do to use AI responsibly and ethically?
Plenty, as it turns out.
Start by identifying responsible AI practices and policies that everyone in the organisation must follow when using AI. Incorporate these practices and policies into your existing compliance framework to ensure that the use of AI does not result in security breaches or privacy invasions.
Share your responsible AI principles and guidelines with all vendors and partners and make sure that they also follow them religiously. Provide training on responsible AI practices to all employees and third parties to increase awareness about ethical considerations and potential biases, and to ensure that users don’t do harm when using AI.
Next, get all AI models and results regularly reviewed – by humans. AI is intelligent but lacks intuition and self-awareness. Human beings do possess these qualities and can therefore review AI and make sure that it adheres to all the components of Responsible AI:
- Explainability and interpretability: Users can easily understand users and how the system got to its output.
- Fairness: The system is not biased or discriminatory; it uses diverse and representative data to ensure equality and equity.
- Robustness: The AI can handle exceptional or abnormal conditions without causing unintentional harm.
- Transparency and accountability: The user of the AI model can evaluate its functionality and determine whether it is appropriate to their use case(s).
- Privacy: The tool and its models adhere to all privacy regulations when processing personal information during training or for output-generation.
Integrate all responsible AI practices into the firm’s AI development pipeline. This means that every step of the pipeline – data collection, model training, deployment, and ongoing monitoring – should adhere to your company’s responsible AI practices and satisfy all of the above responsible AI components.
Some other ways to use AI responsibly:
- Regularly monitor and assess all AI models for fairness, transparency, and compliance with the company’s ethical guidelines.
- Take immediate action to mitigate any identified biases, catastrophic forgetting, and brittleness in AI systems.
- Clearly document the data sources and algorithms used to train AI models, and models’ decision-making processes.
- Define clear lines of accountability to ensure that the right parties can be held responsible for the outcomes of AI systems.
- Establish clear safeguards and policies to protect user privacy and sensitive data.
Conclusion
If our ancestors were alive today, they wouldn’t recognise the modern-day monde du travail (world of work). AI has played, and will continue to play, a major role in the transformation of this world. AI has completely upended the way we work by automating a host of tasks and helping us to enhance productivity, efficiency, and innovation.
That said, adopting AI in the workplace can be a complex endeavour, particularly for companies that are not prepared for its potential challenges. Fortunately, it is possible to reduce the complexity. The key is to adopt certain strategies that can empower leaders to implement AI effectively, use it responsibly, and harness its potential to open up more opportunities for business growth, progress, and success.
