AI: Deliberate augmentation not accidental infiltration.
The statistics on Microsoft Copilot 365 are impressive. The early adopters have shown that in many cases there can be a positive impact on productivity. There was at least one surprising (and worrying) number that 16% used the time saving to have more meetings.
This highlights that we have become caught in a trap where a productive day is one where your calendar is full, not one where outcomes have been achieved. Thankfully the curse of the Snapchat streak driving teenagers behaviour hasn’t yet resulted in a “back to back meeting” badge in the workplace.
There is a more significant point to make. The application of new technologies to old working practices has limited benefits. The real benefits come from rethinking why, how, and what we do.
Dave Wright and Brian Solis writing on CIO.com say:
AI creating, rather than eliminating, jobs is one of the many surprising ideas that have emerged. We don’t fully understand AI’s long-term impact, but it’s clear that it will augment people and fundamentally transform how we work.
Too often we approach the future through a lens of fear. More often it is the case that technology creates new employment opportunities. This should allow us to view the future through a lens of optimism.
There has been discussion about the need to create ‘human-in-the-loop’ workflows as automation technologies are adopted. This is necessary for many reasons.
I would suggest that we need to go further. We need to think about how we can augment human and AI capabilities beyond single process designs.
The OODA (observe, orient, decide, act) loop is a good starting framework for this.
Machine Learning and AI technologies are good at observation, spotting, and making sense of data.
What has been shown is that without context the orientation and decision making results in hallucinations. The human capabilities to prompt & challenge and speculate & anticipate can address this limitation.
Understanding that the AI tools improve our observation and support our decision making allows us to rethink how to achieve our outcomes.
The AI tools then allow for simulation and experimentation before we have to make the final decision to act. This augmented approach allows for many more OODA loop cycles to be run and multiple versions of the future explored.
As Air Canada recently found out automating your processes can have consequences that undermine your whole adoption approach. Our expectations of what is possible are high. The reality is that there is a long way to go to achieve some of the more ambitious claims.
Depending on your age, you may remember when searching the internet involved something other than Google. The results varied significantly, you had to go through multiple pages to get something useful, different services behaved in very different ways. Then Google did something that set the benchmark and became the standard.
It may be possible for AI to achieve more than we believe is possible. But to attempt to get to that point today may be a mistake. Tools like Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT are good but not perfect. We are still operating in a space where the human with the technology can achieve more than one on its own.
James Gleick said: “I’ve seen the future, and it is still the future”. The current versions of AI tooling seem futuristic. But they are not the future.
For the best outcome we should be deliberate in our adoption and design of the future we are part of.
If you want to spend more time in meetings then carry on letting the tools creep into your processes and ways of working. If you’re more ambitious and want to see benefits of disruptive technology beyond survival take a more deliberate approach.
Here are some questions you might want to consider:
How can you be deliberate in the adoption of technology to create better outcomes rather than just improving today?
What are the assumptions we’re making about the future and how can we test them?
Which are the skills which remain and could become more important?
Considering the “jobs to be done”, What are the adjacent skills which can be developed in the near term?
Based on the outcomes we want to achieve, what skills should we invest in for the future?
