In his latest article originally published on Forbes, Steve Niesman shares actionable insights on balancing technological advancements with human-centric approaches in your AI initiatives. By focusing on business fundamentals, the human experience and continuous learning, your AI strategy will have a greater chance of success and evolving over time. You get there by fostering a culture of transparency and emphasizing collaboration.
Fundamentals to Putting the Human Element Back in Your AI Strategy
Fundamentals to Putting the Human Element Back in Your AI Strategy
With AI, there is much to consider. While we absolutely need to ensure that safety and ethical concerns are met, one of the greatest benefits of generative AI is how it allows us to spend more time with customers and dedicate more time to continuous reinvention.
If the goal, as Simon Sinek describes in Infinite Game, is to keep playing within our chosen industries and continuously reinvest ourselves, then we need to think about a few basic truths: We know that relationships drive how business is made; it doesn’t rest on product or service alone. And we know that every company, regardless of industry, exists to grow their revenue, profits and people.
That’s the north star for our companies and everything we do, no matter what. AI, like any technology, is no different. Its fundamental purpose is to enhance the human experience whether those people are your employees or your customers.
In general, the phases of adopting AI within your organization will look like this:
- Phase zero is a learning and experimentation stage that is more about discovering opportunities for individual efficiencies and impact.
- Phase one is putting tools in place across your organization to create some level of efficiency; most of these tools will be off the shelf. These are internally focused and specific to individual productivity, not team-focused tools.
- Phase two is about evaluating your own business processes, workflows and use cases to determine which larger toolsets are right for team-focused efficiencies.
- Phase three is where you start creating integration between generative AI and other tools in your technology landscape to create even larger efficiencies at the organizational level.
- Phase four is where you start to create innovations, go to market and sell to your customers.
Phase one is where you align with purpose
Today, most companies are in, or need to begin, phase zero. However, there will come a day when the use of AI technologies will be so ubiquitous that the efficiencies and cost savings gained by early adopters will no longer be a differentiator. Those advantages will fade.
Thus, what we do with the technology and the time savings gained will be more important as we continue to evolve in an AI-driven landscape. That idea is easy to say but can be hard to implement. For a place to start, I come back to purpose—the reason each of our companies exists in the first place.
Phase one will be the tipping point for aligning your AI strategy with your purpose. As people get more time back in their day thanks to automating mundane, repetitive or low-value tasks, this is the opportunity for your people to spend more time doing the cool stuff—creating things that add value and that customers will buy.
That’s why I keep coming back to our need to grow revenue, people and profits. Our people are the most important piece of this entire puzzle. As they learn and identify new opportunities, so do we.
Leading with empathy goes beyond change management
As always, there will be pitfalls. Some employees will want to move fast and try everything, while others will fear being replaced by AI. Too many experiments can drain your budget and your people’s time, and yet you must move forward knowing that perfection isn’t possible.
There will also be times when you have to learn and experiment to identify the gaps between your current state and where you want to go. Sometimes it will get messy before it gets good, and your job is to encourage a safeguarded mess so that you can get to the good.
As a result, each phase must be executed with equal parts empathy and business acumen. Change management conversations are a part of that, but they aren’t all that’s needed. The empathy piece means ensuring that what you put in place will not erode the relationships you’ve built with your employees and customers.
For example, one of our senior vice presidents was working with a software engineering team and wanted to see where AI could assist. The engineers were struggling with some code on a project when the senior vice president used AI to generate the necessary code, which happened to be in a different language than expected.
On the one hand, it was a great example of efficiency. On the other, this senior vice president felt that using it at that moment would undermine the developers’ confidence, and it was more important to save it for the next time. This decision underscored the importance of team morale and revealed the future benefits of AI at the same time.
Always invest in your people
While we know in general terms that some jobs will go away and new roles will be added thanks to AI, it is also true that we cannot squander our talent.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, we may see a decline in GDP through 2032 due to declining demographics. There are not enough younger generations entering the workforce to support the older generations entering retirement. That means we’re still competing for talent over the long term and will likely have to do more with fewer people. Thus, the AI revolution is not happening in a vacuum. There are still multiple factors to consider when it comes to running our businesses, and our people are just as important as ever.
If we are to help our businesses grow, then AI will be our opportunity to develop our people so that they can help us continue to reinvent ourselves and remain relevant. I think a few people have mentioned this, but we have not said it as strongly as we need to.
If we’re going to use AI to its greatest effect, then we must invest in our people. Fear of failure, criticism or negative career impact cannot consume them, otherwise, that fear will become a barrier to innovation and growth.
This article was originally published on Forbes. Steve Niesman is a member of the Forbes Business Council.