There can be little doubt that AI has been the predominant business theme of the past year — and there is no reason to think that it will not continue to be in the coming 12 months, too. Ever since ChatGPT burst on the scene in November 2022, executives have been working out the ramifications for their organizations, while society at large has been more than a little worried about what all this will mean for employments levels. It is no coincidence that a book about AI won the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year award earlier this month, while the non-fiction shelves of bookstores are full of volumes with AI in their titles.
While AI is, of course, already all around us in the form of chatbots on companies’ websites, in the apps on our mobile phones and elsewhere, it is fair to say that we have probably seen nothing yet when it comes to the scope of what AI will be able to do, even by this time next year, let alone in a decade or so. Whether this will be good or not so good depends, to a great degree, on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist and where you are coming from. As Harriet Molyneaux, managing director of HSM Advisory, an international consultancy focused on the future of work, says, proponents suggest that introducing AI will free up significant amounts of individuals’ time at work so that they can devote themselves to more interesting tasks, while others believe that some workers will just fill the time freed with other dull things and colleagues will be “let go” to reduce headcount. With many leaders spending freely on AI because they feel they need to keep up with technology or because they feel it will somehow deal with the recurring issue of poor productivity, there so far seems to be little understanding of how the technology can be truly effective.
However, one way forward could be the approach of Inversity, a UK-based company started by people with experience of introducing AI and digital approaches in general to central government and to related areas, such as defence and healthcare. At the core of the company’s operation is the aim of developing the technological skills of all sorts of large organizations using AI. As part of this it has also been helping teenagers so that they make a genuine impact when they join the workforce. Related to both is a program of using challenges to solve real-world complex problems.
One of the organizations that has worked with Inversity is Heart of Mercia Multi-Academy Trust, which provides education to 10,000 students aged between 11 and 18 across a range of institutions in the English Midlands. Chief executive Peter Cooper said in a recent interview that, while there was “a tension between the good and the bad” of AI, he saw great value in being able to provide “an environment that enables students to use its potential” and so help them become “real-world ready.” He added that it soon became apparent after starting working with Inversity that AI was “not something just for techies but something that everybody needed a grasp of.”
The value of using the AI-based challenge approach adopted by Inversity is also acknowledged by Ryan Shea, managing director of PUBLIC, which helps the public sector use technology and become more innovative. He stresses that people should not see AI as a free tool and recognises the balance that needs to be struck between waiting for the technology to become more cost-effective and the need to tackle serious government issues such as hospital waiting lists now. But he is excited by the ability to use the technology to examine problems within large organisations and to move projects along so that, instead of ending with presentations on what should be done, they provide the materials for action. He also sees opportunities for smarter teams to be innovative.
Which brings us back to the role of the individual. As anybody who has tried to use a chatbot to answer a customer service query knows, AI is still some way off being as effective as a good call centre person. But that does not mean that many companies will not use them to deal with basic queries and do away with the need for less-than-engaged employees. In the words of an AI proponent, the way for customer service representatives, and others doing similar jobs, to keep their positions is to become highly effective operators. And in many cases, that will entail using AI to augment their roles. If they do not do this, they will be increasingly vulnerable.
Sukhinder Singh Cassidy is chief executive of Xero, the accounting software company. In an interview earlier this month, she said: “You have to be proactive and think about your own career path,” adding that people had to think about how they could use the tools available to do monotonous tasks and so free up their time to do more valuable work. “These tools are to be taken advantage of,” she said. With the smallest businesses — a key target market for Xero — typically spending nearly half their time on administrative tasks, this is clearly something to be taken seriously.
In the end, though, there is no escaping the fact that individuals and organizations alike need to raise their technological skill levels. As James Kuht, the founder of Inversity, says, “one of the key blocks is a lack of digital literacy.” And, like Heart of Mercia’s Cooper, he stresses that this is not just something for those in the IT departments. And if that sounds offputting to some, they should bear in mind Kuht’s revelation that studies indicate that those with a background in the liberal arts tend to be best at asking good questions in developing AI programs. With the increasing sophistication of these models, making “prompt engineering” less important, the key attribute for employees is problem-solving, he adds.