How AI will impact your workplace?
This page is part of The Workplace AI Strategy Guide
This page is part of a step-by-step guide to Workplace AI strategy, which I'm currently in the process of writing. I'm creating it like an interactive online book. The full table of contents is on the left (or use the menu if you're on a mobile device).
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This page is incomplete!
This page is part of my step-by-step guide to Workplace AI, which I'm in the process of writing. I'm doing it in the open, which allows people to see it and provide feedback early. However many of the pages are just initial brain dumps, bullets, random notes, and/or incomplete.
There's an overview of what I'm trying to accomplish on the "What is this site about?" page.
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—Brian (July 2024)
As AI technologies continue to evolve and integrate into the workplace, they’re not just changing how tasks are performed, but fundamentally reshaping the dynamics of the workplace and how employees relate with the company, management, and each other. The very concept of “what is work?” is now on the table for discussion. This chapter looks at how workplace AI is impacting your workforce, and how it’s affecting relationships, ethics, processes, and the organization of your company. We’ll look at both the challenges and opportunities, with the aim to help you prepare to build and implement a strategy of your own.
In this chapter:
- Reshaping your relationship with your employees
- Reshaping your employees relationships with each other
- Redefining work output, effort, and projects
- Adding new work capabilities
- Humans versus AI: Who should do what?
A fundamental promise of AI is it relieves humans of the boring and mundane tasks, so they can focus on what they love and value. So how does this apply to the workplace? You can think of it at all levels, from executive management, to direct people managers, to individual employees.
- A CEO who used to spend hours each week reading through reports to understand what’s happening at the company can instead access a real-time dashboard, with the ability to ask questions of the data directly. (Lots of additional effort is saved as all the people who built the reports no longer need to do that.)
- A CFO can use AI-powered tools to collect and assemble all the financial data, freeing up their time to interpret and think strategically about the future.
- A Project Manager who used to spend significant time scheduling and progress tracking can now focus on mentoring and helping the projects succeed.
- An HR Manager who used to spend hours sifting through resumes can now spend time meeting with more potential candidates in person.
- A Marketer who previously spent days collecting and analyzing social media metrics can now spend more time coming up with ideas and creating new campaigns, and engaging with other humans in the market.
- A Data Analyst who used to spend most of their time cleaning and prepping data can now spend time actually analyzing it and thinking about what to do next.
Reshaping your relationship with your employees
What do the employees do all day? What if they can do the same tasks in less time? Do you give them more tasks? Do you try to find other things for them to do? (Probably both of these vary based on what the employee wants to do, and also the nature of the company.)
People managing, how much time is that, and what is that? If you got the paperwork off your plate, what would it actually be?
I always think about doctors here. You hear stories about how when people first enter the medicine field, they want to help people. But nowadays they spend only a small part of their time with actual patients, and instead time on paperwork and other clerical tasks. It’s the same for office workers. What are your clerical tasks that AI could help with? Then how else would you spend your time.
Again, the fast horse analogy.
All of these are some form of that. What would you do with your extra time?
Think about this from the company standpoint (the company needs more X), and from the individual standpoint. What do they love most? What’s the most fulfilling? Or do they hate their job and will not like doing 2x as much now?
When can AI do? What should AI do? How do you decide?
How real is the concern about job security? Again, it depends on your company. If you have an externality and cannot grow, then making everyone efficient would lead to cuts.
How performance is evaluated with change. That’s a conversation for later, but we should mention it here at least.
Do your employees want to learn new skills? It’s ok if they don’t, right? Or is it? Was this always the expectation, or a new thing with AI? Obviously AI will introduce a lot of new things, but the question is did you have a culture of experimentation and trying new things, or is that also new with AI?
Reshaping your employees’ relationships with each other
Some people talk about how AI is the great equalizer, but it can also be the great inequalizer, especially if some employees embrace it and others don’t.
It’s so easy to have AI generate everything. When AI helps write emails, is that good or bad? Even if you don’t use Microsoft Copilot, individual employees can still go to a chatbot and ask it to write the email for them. How will employees feel if suddenly a coworker starts writing longer and emails with better grammar, and it’s obvious to everyone that they’re now using AI. Is that offensive? Is it cool? Will employees mentally dismiss them as “AI” now so then other employees just AI them back? (“Hey, if they’re not human writing to me, why should I human write to them?“) Of course they might not even read it, letting AI pick it up in its daily summary. What does that means for your company now?
Will this increase or decrease social action? Social media was supposed to bring everyone closer together. But now that everyone has 1,000 friends, there are algorithms and suggested responses, and it’s all fake and we don’t even feel close anymore. Will that happen at the office?
Will people share tips they learn, or hoard them? Will people align what they learn with what would actually help the company, or will they just crank out whatever the perverse incentives provide them with the most reward for the least effort?
Redefining work output, effort, and projects
- Shift focus from hours worked to value created
- Rethinking project timelines and resource allocation
- quantity vs. quality
- How do you measure individual contributions in AI-augmented teams
Adding new work capabilities
How does your company invent knew things? How are employee contributions valued? How could that change?
Humans versus AI: Who should do what?
- How do you identify things best suited for AI vs. humans? Story about the call center who gave all the “easy” calls to AI, and everyone quit because suddenly they only had the hard things to do but their paychecks didn’t change.
- Is it realistic to keep a human in the loop?
- Balancing efficiency gains with maintaining human skills