Workplace AI: Introduction & Key Concepts

Brian Madden,Workplace AI Consultant & Analyst

This page was last updated on July 11, 2024.

Welcome to the Workplace AI Strategy Guide!

This guide is my in-progress and ongoing effort to explore and explain the impact that AI is having in all of our workplaces. I am specifically focused on what I’m calling “Workplace AI”, which are the AI tools that individual employees are able to use directly. (So this is things like individual employees using ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot in their everyday jobs, not companies using AI behind the scenes.)

I’m a tech consultant who’s spent 30 years focusing on how employees use technology for their jobs, and it’s my belief that employee AI use is more widespread than most companies or workplace managers know, and that it’s important to understand the “real” issues and what’s actually going on out there before you start to make a plan. (Read my full bio here. I’m a vendor-neutral consultant and not trying to sell any AI products.)

AI is super hot right now, and it seems like a million consulting companies have popped up overnight to help you with AI. I want to say, “Wait, pause for a second. Before you engage with AI consulting companies, or vendors selling AI products and services, take a couple of hours to read through what I’ve put together here to educate yourself on the real issues and impact. Because I think to do this right, it’s a lot more than just picking the right tool and going through a workshop or two.”

You’re reading the first (of 18) chapters. This intro chapter covers the following:

• Why are we here?
• Why now?
• Perspectives on this guide
• What is workplace AI?
• Potential benefits
• Risks
• Common misconceptions about workplace AI

Why are we here?

Let’s start with the very basics: Why are you reading a guide about workplace AI? Why today?

For me, it all boils down to this:

Employees around the world have access to extremely powerful AI tools (such as ChatGPT, etc.). Survey after survey shows that people are using these tools at work, in many cases without the company even knowing about it. So to me, it doesn’t matter whether you believe these tools are any good, or whether AI is hype. Your employees don’t care what you think, they just know that they can go to some website, paste in some work docs, ask it a few questions, and the work that used to take them hours to produce is spit back to them in seconds.

Do the employees care about the quality? Is it better? Or worse? Or good enough? Frankly if employees are using these tools, it doesn’t matter what the quality is, because the AI-generated output is now becoming part of your company’s document and knowledge core.

What’s truly wild is that the number of people who are using these tools keeps on growing. ChatGPT went from zero to 1 million users in 5 days, and 100 million users in 2 months. It’s completely unprecedented. And now in addition to ChatGPT, there’s Claude, Llama, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Perplexity, Mistral, and hundreds of other companies you never heard of who are creating extremely powerful tools which your employees are using to do their jobs today. Every day that passes, and every new tool that’s released, leads to more and more employees using them.

As you can imagine, all this brings up a lot of issues. For example,

• Is this fair? If one employee uses AI and another doesn’t, will the AI-using employee start to get ahead? Will they share their new superpower with management or their coworkers, or will they keep this to themselves as a little secret?

• What about the bias and hallucinations? If people use ChatGPT, will more bad things get into their work?

• What about the quality of output? ChatGPT is amazing for some things, but for others, people read it and feel “meh, that’s just some low-grade college kid work.” But if you have employees who start using it, will their work quality decrease?

• What about security? If employees are putting proprietary company info or customer data into their chats, is that now being added to the AI borg in the sky?

• There are products that employees can use today to listen in on Zoom and Teams calls, to take notes, write summaries, etc. Individual employees can use these tools without the company even knowing about it.

• What about employee efforts? If ChatGPT lets employees do their jobs in less time, will they raise their hand to take on more work? What if you catch them? What if not everyone does this?

The wild thing about everything above is that these are all things that are real today. This is not a far-off sci-fi future. You have employees in your company doing these things right now.

As a workplace leader, you need to think about how you respond to this. Do you punish employees for “cheating” and not doing their jobs, or do you celebrate and promote their newfound proficiencies? How would either of these even work? So what do you do? Do you do anything? Can you do anything? Should you do anything? If you just ignore all this, or wait until the technologies are “more mature”, will it be too late? Will you get behind and never catch up? Will your employees use these tools anyway? Will your competitors use them and beat you in the market?

This is why we’re here.

Why now?

I’m writing this in July 2024. Why is any of this relevant today? Why does it matter now, and not next month or next year? Why should you care about AI in the workplace today?

Several reasons:

First is that AI is “real enough” to start impacting the way a company works today. That whole list of bullet points from above is not things that might happen in theory one day, rather, these are all things that are happening today.

Another interesting factor is the huge hype bubble around AI. Lots of people think that AI is not real yet, not important, or is just hype which will die soon. Those might all be true, but also, I go back to that bullet list above. Those are all things that are happening today. Even if the AI bubble bursts, and all AI advancement stops, ChatGPT is still a thing, and employees will continue to use it for their jobs even if the company doesn’t know about it. So regardless of what the future holds, you have to know what’s going on today.

Third, AI is in its infancy. The capabilities that exist today will seem like child’s play in a couple of years. (Don’t believe me? Look back to prior versions of ChatGPT. GPT-3 from 2020 could simulate a young child, GPT-3.5 from November 2022 was like an advanced high school kid, GPT-4 from March 2023 was like a college student, so what do you expect GPT-5 to be like when it’s released at some point in the future?) More advanced GPTs mean that employees can use them for more advanced tasks. It’s important to understand what their potential is now so you can get in front of them with a plan.

Finally, it’s important to start thinking about the impact of AI in your company while there’s still time to make and implement a strategy. You don’t want to wait until half your employees have super-human writing tools on their phones to start to think, “Hey, this could be awkward at work, what do we do about it?”

I’ve said it already, but I’ll say it again and again: The AI technologies available to your employees are going to change / shake up the way your workplace operates. It’s already happening now, and it’s going to accelerate in the future. It’s important for you to think about the implications now, and to start to build a plan and figure out what this means now—not in another few months or years when things get really crazy.

Who am I, what’s my motivation, and what’s my world view on all this?

I figure it’s good to know some things about me so you can understand who you’re reading and why.

First, Hello! I’m Brian. My full bio is here, but the short version is I’m an American living in Paris who’s been in IT since 1994. I’m writing this guide in the first-person perspective, so when you read “I” or “me”, that’s me, Brian. I’ll use “you” or “your” for you, the reader, from the perspective as you being someone who’s responsible for employee AI use at your workplace. I don’t make any assumptions about what role you have in your company. You could be IT, HR, Legal, management, or anyone interested in how your employees and colleagues use AI tools in the workplace.

Most of my career has been focused on the part of IT called end-user computing (EUC). This area is about how employees use the technology the company provides: laptops, mobile devices, apps, VPNs, etc. It was all pretty straightforward when I started 30 years ago, but it’s gotten progressively more complicated as technology advanced and people started working from everywhere (home, office, coffee shop, etc.). It’s also more complicated today because in the old days, the IT department was the gatekeeper of all technology. But today, anyone can access any website or app they want, to do almost anything they want. If a company doesn’t provide the tools or technology an employee wants, no problem, they’ll just find it on their own!

This is awesome for employees and a nightmare for companies.

Throughout my career, I’ve focused on sharing “real world” knowledge with people. I’ve written a bunch of books, and the reason I started writing (more than 20 years ago) was I felt like the “official” information from software vendors was too rosy and perfect, and didn’t reflect what was actually happening in the real world.

So for my entire career, I’ve focused on the no-BS, real-world strategy and implementation of technology.

During the pandemic, I spent time helping people understand and build strategies for remote working. As I was doing that, I had a front-row seat to the “return to work” struggles which emerged a few years later. Companies wanted employees to come back into the office, but many employees wanted to keep working remotely.

I learned that there were (and still are) many complications with no easy solutions. For example, if a worker who previously lived in a high cost of living area moved somewhere cheaper, should the company pay them less? Most employees feel “no way, they’re doing the same job!” But what if their new next-door neighbor works at the same company and does the same job, but they’re paid less because they’ve always lived in the cheap place? Should the company give them a raise, just because they have a new neighbor who once upon a time lived in an expensive city?

This complexity, which gets people thinking about, “What it means to work” and “What are employees actually paid for?” is just a preview of the types of the issues that come up when employees start using AI tools, (especially when some employees use them and others don’t.)

November 2022: ChatGPT is released to the public

By 2022, the immediate pandemic danger was winding down, and companies were trying to figure out their “RTO” (Retun to Office) policies. Many employees enjoyed the shift to working remotely driven by the pandemic, (and many employees had relocated far away from the offices they used to go into ever day). Other employees—and many CEOs—wanted to get workers back into the office. There were numerous stories of employee revolts, CEOs declaring (and then walking back) mandatory RTO dates, and companies declaring they would be remote-first permanently. The global conversation was about what the future of work would look like, what employees expect their companies to provide, and what companies can expect from their employees. It really was a wild time.

It was into this world that OpenAI released ChatGPT in November, 2022.

Even though technologies like ChatGPT had existed for several years at this point, they were only known to AI geeks. To the average person, “AI” was something that came from movies, like “2001: A Space Odyssey”, “Terminator”, and “Her”.

ChatGPT was an immediate hit. It became the fastest growing application in history shortly after it was released. (I already mentioned it grew to 100 million users in 2 months.) Personally I didn’t even use ChatGPT right away. But when I finally did, in May of 2023 or so, I very quickly realized that the world of work was about to change. Like, big time. Big, big time. And soon.

I became one of those annoying people who talked about ChatGPT all the time. I told my friends about it. Coworkers. My family. I was using it for almost everything I did, learning it’s limitations, seeing how quickly it improved, figuring out where I could use it and where it didn’t work. But the more people I talked to, the more I realized people were not ready. Some people truly had no idea what it could do, while others realized it would have a huge impact on the workplace but had no idea what to do. A lot of people just kept dismissing ChatGPT as “fancy autocomplete” or “not even real AI”.

But whatever it was, I realized it was going to be huge, and it was going to hit us fast, and I had to get ready. By June of 2023, I started reading everything I could on AI and what was happening in the AI industry. I wrote my first article on LinkedIn about AI, and devoted my working hours to digging in and understanding how AI was going to change the workplace, and what companies could do about it.

I knew that I would never become an “AI Expert”. That’s impossible, as there’s too much to learn and I’m too old for that. But I knew that my 30 years of experience understanding how employees use technology in the office would provide a solid foundation for me to to understand how the AI technology would impact regular companies when all their employees started using it.

That exploration which I began just over a year ago is what led to the guide you’re reading now. My goal here is to give you all the information you need to be ready for the upcoming deluge of your employees bringing their own AI solutions to the office, and figuring out what that means for your employees and your company.

One final note, which I’ve mentioned a few times before but I’ll reiterate again. I am approaching all this from an independent and vendor-neutral standpoint, with my real goal to be understanding the impact of AI in the workplace. I’m a consultant, and people hire me to help understand and build plans in this area, but I don’t sell or resell any AI products. I’m just trying to get people to understand the impact and issues around workplace AI, to give them the baseline knowledge and understanding to know how to make an approach, and to get people ready for the next steps of building policies and starting to use AI products.

So that’s the situation! Let’s continue our journey, with the next step being to look at what I mean when I use the term “Workplace AI”. This will help you understand what this guide covers, and, maybe more importantly, what it doesn’t cover.

What is Workplace AI?

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