What is Workplace AI?
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).
What's this guide all about? Check out the intro or full table of contents.
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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)
This guide, and everything I study and write, is about something I call “Workplace AI”. I’m not sure if this is an official term or not, but it’s the term I use to differentiate the AI tools directly used by employees in the workplace from other back-end AI tools that a company uses as part of their core business. To put it simply.
Workplace AI is:
- AI tools used directly by employees in their day-to-day work
- Tools that are often available to employees without company intervention
- AI that affects how employees do their jobs, the work they produce, and how they interact with each other.
Workplace AI includes all the employee-facing tools you read about or use yourself: ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, Apple Intelligence, AI meeting note takers, etc. Many workplace AI tools are directly available to employees, and in most cases can (and do) use these tools at work without the company even knowing!
Workplace AI tools are available directly to employees!
Unlike most technologies, and most AI technologies, “Workplace AI” is different because these tools are available directly to employees. Employees can use workplace AI even without the company’s knowledge or permission. In fact, even if a company thinks that AI is complete over-hyped BS, the employees can still use AI on their own. This is very different from traditional technologies!
Of course workplace AI tools can also be purchased by the company and provided to employees, just like any other IT app. But because employees can also get them on their own, if a company doesn’t provide tools, or doesn’t provide any guidance for employees, then different employees will randomly find and starting using AI tools on their own.
This can be a big risk to the company, because many employees are not aware of the limitations, biases, risks, compliance challenges, and other issues the use of random tools introduces to the workplace. There are other more fundamental issues too. Many employees report using these tools to do significant parts of their jobs for them. This can be a liability for the company, or it can be a good thing.
One thing is for certain: workplace AI touches many aspect of a company: IT, HR, the executive management team, legal, etc. It’s not just an IT or tech issue, and it’s not something that can be solved by the CIO or IT. Every company needs to think about the impact these tools will have, and make a plan for how they want to support them.
Can’t I just block these?
No.
Blocking or banning these things does’t work. And even if it did, doing so doesn’t address the core issue.
The IT industry has a lot of experience in this area. This concept is called “The Consumerization of IT (COIT)” or “Shadow IT.”
In the old days (like the 1980s-2000s), the IT department controlled technology, and if IT told an employee “no”, then that was pretty much the end of that. But with the rise of mobile devices, app stores, and the cloud in the early 2010s, suddenly individual “rogue” employees or departments could purchase and use their own tools.
We saw this all over the place: people used WhatsApp and iMessage instead of the lame corporate chat app, Dropbox replaced corporate file shares, Zoom replaced Webex, people used Gmail to get around corporate email attachment limitations, etc.
Not only was IT powerless to stop this, but in many cases, IT did’t even know it was happening. The longer term impact for most companies was a complete overhaul of how IT provided services. Suddenly they flipped from the department of “No” to the department of “Treat employees as customers and delight them with great service.”
All of this was to try to entice employees to use the company-provide tools, because the reality is there’s no way to completely block employees from using their own tools (unless you are a very secure location that does not allow any personal electronics in or out of the building).
But with regards to personal use of AI tools, if your employees have their own phones, they can use ChatGPT and anything else they want. (Oh and by the way, those “AI detection” tools which supposedly detect if content was generated by AI do’t work. They are extremely simple to get around, and even when used they are not nearly accurate enough to be safe.)
On top of all this generative AI tools have many positive uses, and if you simply block them all then you risk putting your company and employees at risk of being “left behind”, which is not a position you want to be in.
(We’ll discuss all of this in much more depth throughout this guide.)
But these things are changing so fast? How do I even?
Understanding the impact of workplace AI, and building a strategy around how you deal with employees using AI, does not require that you understand how all the various AI tools work. You do’t need to have answers to all the questions outlined so far.
The important thing is that you understand the types of things that are happening, have some ideas of what options exist to address them, and feel comfortable implementing whatever policies and strategies make sense for your company.