Understanding AI
Introduction
GenAI is becoming part of the way people are doing business, ie it is becoming part of the daily work and is a way of achieving a competitive edge.
Furthermore, most organisations expected GenAI to disrupt their industries. GenAI will create significant ripples across all activities, tasks, etc in organisations. For example, as a result of GenAI, the fastest growing job opportunities are AI and machine learning specialists, digital transformation specialists, etc; while jobs in administration and involve repetitive tasks like bank tellers, data entry, etc are on the decline.
NB GenAI is a technology, not a strategy.
The use of AI technology is accelerating.
"...Three quarters of knowledge workers now use AI tools in their work..."
Prosci, 2024b
"...GenAI tools produce complex changes that impact many stakeholders across the enterprise. Effectively managing these changes from adopting GenAI technology starts with understanding desired benefits and how it aligns with business goals..."
Prosci, 2024b
GenAI can help
Research has shown
"...the impact of AI reveals that businesses can benefit from equipping people across the organisation with GenAI tools that increase productivity and innovation in their day-to-day work..."
Prosci, 2024b
(source: Prosci, 2024b)
Some areas that GenAI is having an immediate impact is on the administrative and analytical nature of service-related work, especially in banking and software industries.
At this stage (late 2024), AI has not been able to master tasks that require emotional intelligence, ethical decision-making, creativity, highly contextual interaction, etc.; some examples of these include negotiations, critical medical decisions, developing original recipes, social work, etc.
However, there are areas where
"...AI can assist, enhance, augment human capabilities, making processes more insightful without fully replacing the human touch..."
Prosci 2024b
These areas include analysing data, enhancing creativity, automating routine tasks, performing predictable maintenance; some examples include identifying patterns in data sets, assisting with fashion design, managing basic customer service enquiries, monitoring industrial equipment to prevent failures.
Then there are areas that can be fully AI automated
"...Tasks that AI can fully automate because human intervention is minimal or unnecessary, to optimise processes, reducing the need for human labour competitive or predictable tasks.
This is the work AI can do completely for employees, including transactional tasks, information gathering and reporting, basic content creation, and customer support. For example, processing invoices and payments, producing stock market reports, generating simple marketing content..."
Prosci 2024b
Some perceived benefits of using GenAI include
- saves time
- allows people to focus on the more important tasks
- assists creativity
- makes work more enjoyable
Meetings and AI
"...We know that inefficient meetings are the number one productivity disrupter..."
Lucy Debono as quoted by Euan Black, 2024c
Yet we are having more and more meetings.
"...People were having three times as many team meetings in early 2023 as they were in February 2020..."
Microsoft Research as quoted by Euan Black, 2024c
Furthermore, most people don't need to be at the meeting all the time, especially if not all topics are relevant to them.
AI is creating new communication tools via Google Meet, Co-pilot in Microsoft's Teams, Avoma, HubSpot, Loom, etc that are attempting to solve this problem, it
"...lets users ask questions about what has been said and can summarise people's contributions in simpler terms, recap the meeting so far, list the best action items, explaining which questions remain unresolved, and generate meeting notes..."
Euan Black, 2024c
"...The catch-up and recap functions will make meetings more efficient, while the summary function will reduce the number of meetings altogether. Why go to an hour-long meeting if you can read a fairly accurate summary of it in 5 minutes? Attendance would only make sense if you believe that you can make a particularly valuable contribution to the discussion..."
Bede Hackney as quoted by Euan Black, 2024c
Levels of AI maturity
