AI is transforming the world of work, are we ready for it? | FT Working It

artificial intelligence is set to reshape our workplaces what does this mean for my job am I going to have a job or will my children have jobs companies are itching to incorporate AI into their systems but are we really ready for it so 2third of our desk worker population are still not using this technology I'm Isabelle baric I host the ft's working at podcast and write a newsletter about the workplace in this series I'll explore some of the most pressing issues around the future of work and talk to senior leaders about how they're making work

better we have this extraordinary responsibility to shape the new world of work for [Music] everyone San Francisco is one of the tech hubs of the world and AI is definitely in the air generative AI is kind of a subset of artificial intelligence more broadly there's a long history behind this technology but really when we talk about generative AI today what we're talking about is really something that's emerged over the last three years is translate between uh text images video audio even code and now you're seeing that technology applied to lots of other types of patterns

including things like DNA even and so the big turning point was with the launch of chat GPT in in 2022 at the end of the that year where for the first time you know anybody any user could literally just communicate directly interact with a generative AI system and since then there's been a lot of these since ai's explosion into public Consciousness in 2022 we've also seen a huge push from businesses to harness the power of generative AI to streamline the workplace the buzz of AI is being felt everywhere but when talking to many Business Leaders

one wise person said to me that CEOs have bought Ferraris in the shape of state-of-the-art AI systems they just haven't given any driving lessons to their staff a survey of 10,000 desk workers found that the AI benefit that executives are most looking forward to is increased productivity among workers but Leader's biggest concerns about embracing AI are around data security and privacy followed by distrust in AI I's accuracy and reliability what we see in the data is that the executive urgency to incorporate AI is at an all-time high right this has increased seven times over the

last 6 months so this is the most top of- mind thing for executives worldwide but what's really interesting is two-thirds of our desk worker population are still not using this technology so there's this really interesting disconnect Salesforce Global HQ in San Francisco is home to slack Workforce lab which studies how to to make work better the team there has been researching what motivates workers to use AI I went to meet the head of the workforce lab and SVP of research and analytics Christina janza so what are the conditions that might make workers more likely to

trust AI or be interested to use it we've been really interested in sort of understanding this gap of executive urgency and employee adoption and so what we really wanted to do is let's better understand the humans right why are the humans using it or not using it and so we did some research to really understand the emotions that people are feeling about Ai and we uncovered five different personas that sort of help us understand the AI workplace the first one is called a maximalist this is a person who's very excited about the technology they use

it very actively the second Persona also using AI very actively is called the underground and the really interesting thing about the underground is although they're using it and getting a lot of value from it they're hiding their usage they're hiding their II usage because they feel guilty and they feel like people are going to think that they're cheating and then the next three are the ones that aren't really actively using AI so the rebel is the person who feels like AI is a little bit of a threat the Super Fan is very excited about AI

but they they aren't using it themselves they don't know how to start and the final one is the Observer The Observer is simply someone who's in a wait and see mentality they they show some interest they show some caution they're just not actively engaged and they're kind of just waiting to see how the whole thing plays out intrigued I took slack test to find out what AI Persona I have what is your AI Persona take the slack AI Persona quiz to find out who you are how frequently do you use AI tools for work rated

tasks M probably a couple of times a week how do you feel about the use of AI in the workplace excited guilty indifferent concerned relieved reluctant excited actually I'm concerned about AI replacing my job I'm quite old so I'm just going to put two for that I'm interested in learning or further developing AI skills yes I'm a five on that I'm a maximalist as a maximalist I can see the benefits that AI can offer but with companies full of Staff with such diverging views on AI is it a good idea to have everyone speeding ahead

so do you think that organizations should have put guard rails in place first I mean is moving so quickly that's hard is there a trust piece missing here I guess is what I'm saying there is a trust piece missing I mean what we see in the in the data is that only 7% of workers worldwide fully trust AI right and and that that's to be expected with new technology you have to use it you have to get used to it in order to really understand whether you can trust it um the other thing that's really

interesting about trust is there's a big manager component here people who feel trusted by their manager are twice as likely to actually try AI what I think you're saying is there's there's a very human part to this do you get on with your colleagues do you trust your manager do you feel safe to communicate where you've got things wrong oh my gosh I'm so happy you said it like that because I think so much of the conversation that we're having is around the technology right all of the amazing advances that we're making all of the

amazing things that this technology can do but you can build the coolest technology in the world and if people don't use it it doesn't matter and so it's your question about should people have come up with guidelines earlier maybe but I also think we need to give leaders a break right this is new technology is developing so quickly and we're just trying to catch up and so what we suggest is it's not too late right now's the time to really sit down and figure out what is your policy going to be what are you going

to allow your employees to do and just be clear the most important thing is transparency slack has found that when businesses cater for all types of AI personas and have defined safe usage guidelines employees are nearly six times more likely to use AI tools in the workplace but in a recent survey of desk workers 43% say they've received no guidance from their leaders or organization on how to use AI tools at work these models are potentially so powerful they are remarkable in what they could provide to us as humans and if we think that analysis

and uh structured thinking and creativity is a net economic good we really want to be able to distribute that as widely as we can Tech investor and founder of exponential view azim Asar looks at the impact of AI on society I invited azim to the ft's offices to find out more about what AI can and can't do for the workplace how are you using AI yourself at the moment one of my favorites is that I have a number of different AI assistants who will attend my meetings so one is extremely good at taking a detailed

transcript and there's another assistant which evaluates my performance in the meetings and I'll get an email and it'll say you did this well you didn't do this so well next time try doing this what some of the academic research has shown is that the more expertise you have the better you can get out of the system the reason why somebody who's senior can do better with AI than someone who perhaps is is Junior is because when you use a generative AI tool it's a little bit like delegating tasks and who best delegates tasks well people

who've been delegating tasks for 15 or 20 years that is the senior EXA what are the downsides that are obvious to you as someone who is in that world all the time one of the biggest downsides is that this is still quite a complicated technology and I think people who used AI know that but it can also be a little bit unreliable and when you have a complicated technology that's unreliable you have got to be prepared for things to go a bit a skew and Ary and I think firms have to figure out how they

experiment and invest at a pace while recognizing that the ground is going to be shifting quite quite a lot a second issue is going to be about the the Temptation that companies made have to use this first and foremost as a cost cutting exercise and the reason they need to be a little bit careful is that uh this is an unstable market and an unstable environment and so one of the things that I urge bosses to do is to be much much more circumspect about headcount reductions because you never know exactly where the pieces are

going to fall AI is set to be a skills equalizer helping weaker employees to level up but aim has highlighted the complexity of adoption and that it is CEOs who have to lead the charge I think what's been different with the generative AI wave is that it is so easy to use um and it doesn't require changing you know your backend systems or replacing big contracts that you might have with Enterprise software companies or whatever because in a lot of cases tech companies that we already have relationships with in the Enterprise like say Microsoft or

Google these are the companies offering generative AI so can easily pitch to Business Leaders saying you know we're the world's biggest enterprise software companies and we think this is going to change the world there's been a lot of Buzz now verging on maybe even hype around you know if you don't adopt this now you're going to be left behind it's it's a good job of both marketing and a sort of consumer Le technology HR software company ltis has made the move to becoming an AI powered platform I went to their HQ to see its capabilities

so right now I'm logged in as Olivia's manager and what you'll see on the right is a summary of all of the feedback Olivia received over the past year lattice's AI software takes all the available data feedback previous reviews and learns the tone and grammar of the user it then creates an authentic performance review with the best one in the world some managers are terrible at feedback they give bad feedback they're blunt they're clumsy they may offend people what can ltis do to stop that happening so what we are actually maintaining is a set of

what good feedback looks like it should be inclusive it should be actionable it should be concise regardless of what level of experience you have with feedback delivery it's up levels your writing in a way that converges with best feedback writing practices so it saves bad Managers from themselves essentially yes I love it every time we've had advanced in Tech we've had to work harder is the promise of AI that this time we'll get it right we have more Tech that's supposed to simplify that requires more Tech to integrate but our collaboration has not been easier

because there's too much Tech this is what I think is so powerful with AI is that it really is simplifying things down from a experience standpoint the way that we will experience the technology is the way that we interact as humans it doesn't matter if you're in system a or system B that data is brought together behind the scenes so when you ask it a question it can give you an answer so what are you finding are the main use cases for it and also how are people responding in a perhaps more cautious way in

the world of HR you know a bunch of information about structured data around your your your employee record your compensation your performance the feedback you've received all of your skills that you may have and by being able to bring all of that together and just make your work life easier right now to answer questions and give you guidance that's where we're at right now with AI and we're just going to see this develop faster and faster and faster which is amazing but then it also makes you question how do I scill up you know my

my my teams my employees to match these fast changing expectations and how do we govern it over the next year tech companies will unleash the next wave of innovation to business AI agents these Genna assistants won't just tell you what to do but will be given access to perform actions on your behalf but are senior leaders and employees really willing to hand over their [Music] autonomy the questions then is how are we going to manage it how are we going to hold it accountable how are we going to be transparent with decisions that we're making

there is no handbook so hope can't be our strategy that we're going to get it right we have to hold ourselves accountable and be very transparent so that we can learn every step of the way and so that's a thing for leaders is that how do you build trust with your employees with communication education and a deep understanding of what you're intending the AI to do so things are moving very quickly in the AI world is it too quickly should leaders be pressing pause or or how should one best be implementing it's a great question

because one could say you move slow to go fast the other thing is you need to be rapidly experimenting to learn along the way what I will go to is the thing that is holding people back from going fast is their data not being in order Integrations not being set up and people not having understanding for what's happening and then you can move very fast because people will see oh I'm getting this value oh that that my job just got a lot easier I think Sarah is reassuringly unsure about the ways the AI is going

to change how we work it's the biggest workplace shift in our lifetimes no wonder there's a lot of hype and some trepidation we will only find by trial and error what works and companies like latis are asking the questions now so that we can all learn later this is a very expensive technology to build uh for now the companies that are building it they're not passing that cost on to Consumers um or to to customers because they want people to adopt it and that's generally The Playbook of of tech how do you reach enough people

so that you get to a point where you basically can't live without this and then you know you start to make money that's the phase they're in today but that's going to change because it is so expensive to train AI systems you know tens of billions of dollars to build these huge models and the more sophisticated they get the more expensive that becomes so I think the first question is like how much are you willing to pay when it's not clear yet what the real big business benefits are so many leaders have gone all in

on the hype around AI without really thinking about their specific organizational needs one size doesn't fit all is the key to success simply to take a step back a deep breath and think about where AI might truly make a difference and where it's not needed some staff won't want to be forced into using it and the tech itself is still imperfect we aren't very patient about mistakes in the workplace but will we all be willing to shift our Behavior to accommodate the software's learning curve AI is going to transform the world of work no doubt

about that but it's right to be a bit skep iCal [Music]