Welcome everyone to the Humans and AI in the Workplace podcast. Over the last few years, it's become clear that artificial intelligence, AI, is one of the most impactful and disruptive transformations in the workplace. As a leader, you may be wondering how to get started and how to do it in an intelligent way. Or you may be stuck on how to overcome some of the people issues and human bottlenecks your AI has crashed into.
We are here with Dr. Debra Panipucci and Leisa Hart to discuss today's topic, is your organisation primed and ready for AI? There's no doubt that AI in organisations is here to stay. The rocket-like launch of generative AI a couple of years ago has seen many individuals embrace AI, at least at some level, as the introduction of intelligent technology into their daily work.However, that's only the start for leaders in organisations. To fully leverage employees enthusiasm and maintain a competitive edge, companies require a comprehensive approach to integrating intelligent technologies across their entire organisation. Relying solely on the technology itself is not going to generate value. A more holistic transformation is necessary. And this includes the careful consideration of the human experience as individuals, as teams and as that collective, which we call culture. So there's been much talk lately about productivity and where expectations are heading versus reality. And I was listening to a breakfast conversation recently where Stephen King was on a panel and Stephen King is one of the productivity commissioners. And he was talking about we there's much to learn still from previous industrial revolutions and it took us about 50 years to fully move from steam engines to electricity. So that's right. Cause if you want the productivity gains and we are hearing a lot of organisations struggling to get the productivity gains out of AI. So if you want the productivity gains, it really relies on how primed your organisation is to get those productivity gains, right? Because if you think about it, one of the things that you talking about the other day, Lisa, is one of the reasons that it took so long for electricity to become embedded in our way of life is because of the deep investment in infrastructure. And if you think about organisations, we've invested so long in software tools, human capabilities knowledge, training, office space, that it's deeply embedded in organisations and it will take some time to change all of that and then get the productivity going. So if you're thinking about how intelligent technology fits into that, there are so many things about the way we work today that could be improved by various forms of intelligent technologies and also what we've learned over the last you know, 50 to a hundred years has served us well. And some of it we can take forward and some of it we kind of need to park because it no longer is relevant in the way that we live and work and play in this world in the context of intelligent technologies in the mix. So bringing it back to what do leaders in organisations need to be doing to think about priming their organisation for true transformation and that adoption. There's quite a few critical foundations that we often talk about Deb. Yeah. And one of the ones that's been bubbling up for me lately in terms of the work that I've been doing is the sense of control that people have when they're in their jobs. So people have built up their skills and their technical knowledge over time and they're promoted on the basis of that.
And now we're asking them to have intelligent technology that takes away part of that work, that lower level, more manual, might be the analysis or the creation of reports and to let go of that. And that no longer is part of the reason why they're employed by the company. They now need to be able to step back and be able to critically analyse and critically think about what's being presented in front of them in terms of what this means for the organisation, what this means for different departments, what this means for the strategy and the goals and the work that needs to be done outside of just producing the analysis and reports. And it's difficult for people to let go of that control. I mean, we've seen it in so many organisations over the years, just putting in place basic technology like spreadsheets and
I'm not using calculators anymore. And now we're in this future state where we don't even need spreadsheets anymore. It's completely different. There's, there's definitely a role for leaders. Ultimately, this is something that could really well be sparked by your head of people and culture or your chief HR officers, HR directors, because this is really around every leader in an organisation moving away from simply engaging their people to actually inspiring them and getting them to imagine what their job could be like being augmented by intelligent technologies and making sense of that at an individual level, but at a team level at an organisational level. So you've got to really make sure you've got the environment for that to be possible for leaders. So how is that curiosity coming to everyday conversations?
How are they exploring different ways that they can shift the way that they're working in a safe way? And when people do good work, how are you measuring that, reflecting on that? Is it the reward of the lower level work or is it them actually adding extra above and beyond the work that they have been doing in terms of critical thinking and further analysis and connecting the dots and that piece is going to be more important, I think. So coming back to how do you start thinking about this, it's really taking stock, isn't it? Like it's sitting back and saying, where have we got pockets of this working well in our organisation now? And how do you know for a start? Where have we not thought about the future of the workplace that we have and the future of the workplace that we need and what that, what that Delta is, where the gap is and how do we go from here to there? Yeah, it is. It's that reflection on the current state. Where are we today and where do we want to get to? Yep. And there's no doubt there'll be amazing things happening in your organisation that you can absolutely use as that strength based approach to leverage, supercharge the efforts moving forward.
And your people, you'll be able to see where that is working and how it works. Cause it's very obvious when people are enjoying their work, when they're doing well in their work comes out in their body language. comes out in their willingness to above and beyond of what's expected. that discretionary effort is, is always higher. People are more likely to help each other and support each other to learn and experiment when they're not just in a safe environment for that, but they are actually enjoying that. They're kind of curious and they're leaning into it and they're being rewarded for that to your point before. So you can always see where the pockets are, where things are going well. Yeah. So, that's right. And I think it starts with small steps. So it feels so big to get to that future work, that future workplace state. They're just small steps in terms of, you know, looking at what you're doing on a day-to-day basis and analysing. If I knew if there was an AI agent who could do this for me, what would you get them to do? Like I've started making a list of all the things that I would love to have an AI agent that actually did. And it's things like, you know, if I'm running late for a meeting, you know, the AI agent could go, this is the location that you need to get to you're now currently 10 minutes late, but, there's, know, a car park over here that you can get to. So I know exactly the location I'm supposed to be going to, because normally I'm driving and I'm like, man, I should have read that email a bit better because I'm not even sure I'm going to the right place. And it's very, it's a big leap from today to get to that for many people. as a leader in the organisation, whether you're in HR or somewhere else, you can start to look at what are the work activities that could be grouped into a category of these are things that could be done by an AI agent. But one of the factors that comes into play is that every role now needs to be technology role. We all need technology skills. We all need to understand what it is that AI does, how it does it, the inputs that it gets, the outputs that it's creating.
Every role needs to understand that at a basic level because there's no longer that deflection of, that's IT or that's technology and I'm not good with technology. Every role in an organisation now needs to understand technology and be able to use technology and know where new technologies are coming in that could improve the work. one of the things that
think is a great opportunity for leaders in organisations is to really think about how they are setting their people up for success. Cause as you say, moving forward, we need AI skills and human skills. You know, those uniquely human skills are what we're specialist in and we understand the AI world and everyone- just tech skills. Yeah. So AI skills means you have a degree of fluency or literacy around AI, you understand the terms. It doesn't mean necessarily that you're a coder or a data scientist, just some level of AI skills and those uniquely human skills. And so if you're a leader in an organisation, you're thinking about, how do I prime my organisation for AI coming in or intelligent technologies coming in? You need to be thinking about how you're building those both those things in your organisation and looking at it from a lens of what does the future need. As well as that openness of helping your employees to let go of control for what got them to where they are today. Because I think that is a big challenge. Yes, and it's sometimes easier for people to let go when they can see what they're going towards, what they're grabbing hold of. It's hard to let go of something when you can't understand what it is that you're going towards. That's why that AI fluency is so important. When people can understand the technology and how it can be applied, then they can understand how their role will change for the better. And they can look at it in the sense of, I can see how this improves the work that I do. I can see how this makes my life easier and helps me to get my work done.
I can now step up to a whole new level. I may be uncomfortable because I've never been there before, but I'm supported because this technology is doing the piece that at the bottom and I can now elevate.
And it's the, if you can hold those two things around thinking about how do we help build AI skills and the uniquely human skills. So those critical thinking skills, we'll do a whole podcast episode on that because that's, that's an awesome chunky topic. And the ability to, you know, have the crucial conversations and to lean into those moments where it might be a bit difficult or sticky in a way that's uniquely human. That's right. I think a lot of productivity gets held up because the culture of the organisation doesn't exist for people to raise concerns and errors and mistakes. And instead they spend time trying to fix them or work around them until they become visible. We were talking with someone today and she said that nothing really happens until there's a crisis. And it's like, there's usually a few steps before you get to a crisis where things are.
challenging and an issue and people are trying to fix it on their own. So yeah, you're right. There needs to be that ability to speak up in your culture, which is another priming piece that needs to be done. opportunity to do that proactively is a really awesome one for leaders to be looking into right now. Because we all know that it's cheaper to do it proactively than to do it reactively.
We've all been part of those big culture programs that have tried to clean up something that wasn't addressed proactively over a period beforehand or an incident from a risk perspective. So we definitely advocate for that thoughtful planning and that proactive approach because it's cheaper, it's much more enjoyable, less likely to do a whole bunch of harm that takes a lot longer to recover from. And the remedial work that has to happen. is, it's the difference between the prevention activities versus the cleanup activities. Really important part of priming your organisation and getting people ready for intelligent technologies is that overarching mindset. And I will say this until I am blue in the face, which is the technology is here to serve us. So how do you help your people make sense of that? And how do they have that mindset going, what can this technology do for me today? How can it help me today? It's not here to take over your job. It's not here to run the company and make all the decisions. It's here to inform the work that people do. It's here to provide some inputs, not the output. It's here to inform some of the decisions that need to be made. So it's here in service of us. And the more that we get leaders to use that language and that terminology in business.
And in organisations, the more we'll get people feeling like they've got that as a resource, not a competitor for their job, which means we get access to a whole bunch of other neural resources, which we talked about before around fear. That's right. We did hear word on the street that there are some people not pursuing certain career paths because they think it's going to be wiped out by intelligent technology. So if...
The organisation is primed to think about where does the human play a part and how does the human use this technology that is serving people as opposed to the technologies they're being served by the technology. It's just a different version of what was there previously.
And there always needs to be, I think, a human in the loop because we are uniquely human and can think about the human experience if we put a mind to it. That's why there's whole careers now around design thinking and experience design because as humans we can do that. can force ourselves through different process to find a different perspective. Perspective taking is really hard for us to do naturally, so we need sometimes to be guided through that process. But moving forward, that's some of the uniquely human and superpowers that we have, human to human, to think about, okay, well, what is this product delivering? What are the outcomes that the product delivers for a person, if that's for an internal team or a customer directly? Is that a good experience? because the intelligent technology is not going to care about that. They're going to give you ones and zeros, possibly in a pretty format. But there's no emotion attached to that. So we can bring that to it and go, this is good or this is something that needs to be improved. And we can certainly look at things from a risk perspective as well. So there's some great opportunities to start to engage your people around the importance of human in the loop and where.
where the technology is there to serve us. for leaders, there's an important piece here to be able to prime your team, your organisation to be thinking about that experience that their work is creating. Because often employees just follow the process that they've always followed, the tools they've always used, the documents they've always created. And they never really pause to reflect on how are people experiencing this?
Is this the experience that we want to create? Do we want to do something differently? So being able to set that language and that conversation and dialogue now is an important place to start when you're priming your organisation. Cause once that intelligent technology comes in, you'll need to be having those conversations. There's some really good opportunities as well in this priming phase and Where are the high impact areas and what can we do to embrace that? Where are you having those conversations proactively? And we've talked about this on another episode around those respectful transitions. But there are some really good opportunities to get those people involved in those use cases and for them to help make sense of that and help the organisation make sense of where the value sits with the technology and where it's not yet adding value.
And what that roadmap looks like and then how those people can transition some of their skills into other roles. There's a really good place for that inspiration by leaders to come in and instead of just sitting at that engagement conversation, actually really try and capture the hearts and minds and look at, okay, well, this is where the company wants to go. This is where the organisation's strategic vision is. Getting people inspired about if we can solve this There are other things that our customers want us to be doing with them and for them. How does that help us in that strategic? that's that inspiration. Leaders have that opportunity to connect the dots and give people the opportunity to help be part of solving and creating that new future of work. And there's also an important point that you made in the middle of that around priming your employees to understand that the technology won't be perfect the first time you use it. It takes time to train it. So they need to be primed for that optimization mindset of, yes, we create the best version we can with sample data, training data, but the more we use artificial intelligence and machine learning and even copilots that are being trained by global usage, the more it's used, the more it is trained.
And it can be that training can take it in different directions. So it's really helping employees to have that expectation upfront and to not expect it to be perfect when it goes live. Even engaging your employees, your people around setting the guardrails. You know, don't just put in place policies and frameworks, actually get them involved in the, in the design of that. Because again They're going to know the most about your customers, the most about your processes, the most about the risks in their day-to-day work. It's not as simple as putting together a policy, making everyone do an e-learning module, which we all blaze over. Actually get them involved in, okay? And you don't have to get everybody involved, that's not practical, but you can get a cohort of people involved in saying, the future's coming, how do we make it safe for our people customers, how do we protect our data? What are the things that are most important? And you don't have to start with a blank piece of paper because if you can get them involved and they can see how important that is and how accessible it can be in the day-to-day work when they're making those decisions about this product that we're about to ship, have we ticked all the boxes? Do we know it's safe? Do we know it's ethical? Do we know it's all the things that we know our leaders want this to be? We want this to be as well for our customers.
You will get them doing the heavy lifting on engaging other people across the organisation for the importance of it as well. It's that whole change engagement and communications piece. You can start that really early in the development of it. Cause we're seeing some organisations going, but we have an addressable use policy. That's awesome. Does anyone know where it is? Does anyone care about it? They might have ticked through an e-learning module, but how does it make sense in the work that they're doing the decisions that they're making in that moment. Have they made that connection? There's a really good opportunity in that priming phase to go, yes, we need these critical things in place. These guardrails, these policies, these frameworks, and also to do it in really thoughtful way. we've been talking about priming organisations to get ready for AI. How to lead as prioritised and zone in on what's really important be ready because there's a lot of technology that can be turned on. We've already recorded an episode of this podcast series on some of the issues that can arise and watch out for co-pilots and generating mayors. But it's how do they have the conversation? What conversations need to be had? Where do they start with those conversations? think it's really simple. Start with the people. Look at what you've got in your organisation now in terms of the cultural attributes that support the future workplace with intelligent technology in the mix. Or could be blockers. Or could be blockers, things that'll disrupt that adoption or just limit the productivity gains. Yeah, and just do a whole bunch of harm to what was working quite well before. So definitely start with the people, looking at the culture, looking at the education.
Understanding the technology, how you're building people's AI fluency, literacy, data literacy, all of these beautiful terms that we're hearing a lot of now, which are really important because everything that we learn comes from that basis of language and understanding and how you're bringing your leaders together to understand their role in leading a team in the future that's different to what they've done in the past. So how they need to be different as leaders, as a cohort, particularly senior leaders and executives as a really tight cohort because they set the direction there. They have the responsibility for the experience that's created in the organisation. So for me, it's really simple. Start with people. Look at the culture, education and leadership. Then look at the safety, like that connection to the governance and the guardrails and the risks. Make sure that's in place to support them. And then you've got the technology.
But I would add a step just before that to say, start small and looking at and helping people identify what could potentially be automated or intelligent technology do over time as we transition. So it's not that huge leak that we're expecting. It is a piece by piece path that we're on. So start. There might be some pain points in a product or a service that your people are really grappling with now and they want it solved because it's not a great experience for them to align their customer. And they'll know that. So how can you smooth that? How can you use that as an example for a small pilot or a pre-fifth concept? We'll build a plan over time if it's something that you can't...
at, you can't feasibly solve right now, but you think that over time there could be technology to do that. One thing we haven't spoken about in this priming conversation is data.
I feel like there's a piece around AI relies on training data, user data, as you use it, gathering that data. Quality of data versus quantity. You don't want hallucinations. So how do you keep it clean, keep it free, keep it unbiased? So there's definitely an important part of organisational priming that's around data. It's the.
leaders helping their employees reflect on, think about the stand, the data they use, where it's stored, how it's collected, so that there is a path forward to bringing in intelligent technology that can use data in the organisation. You don't just go from zero to a hundred when it comes to data. Something we've talked about before in the context of data is having same, same, different data in different teams and some teams feeling quite protective of that data. And when you put it together, it's not really telling the same story. It might be slightly different because it's coming from a different lens or it's coming from a different source. So how do you reconcile that? Because the intelligent technology doesn't care about who's got the right data. It's just going to use that data. How do you, in this priming phase, start to have the conversation in a transparent way around data and its importance and how it's us need to be shared across the organisation for the benefit of everybody in the organisation. Cause that's ultimately what the technology will require. It's clear that you can't get the productivity gains if your organisation isn't primed for AI. And now's a great time for leaders to be thinking about some of these really important, but also foundational steps in the priming phase. And if you will probably have AI in your business in somewhere within a product already or it is potentially coming in. So how do you think about the impact of that and prime your organisation for that to be taken at scale over time? Now's the time to do the slow thinking to go fast later. Because this technology is quite different to previous technologies.
Previous technologies would improve a piece of process. This technology can fundamentally change the organisation, can wipe out entire career paths, industries. And at the moment, it's kind of in its fun stage. So it's the, you create a picture of a cat on a bike kind of thing, right? so I know what you're doing at work every day. But it will soon get to the point where it is fundamentally changing the work that people do and the organisation structure and foundation. And that is less fun. So it's how do you leverage this early fun stage to start to prime the organisation to be ready for the more serious we are transforming as an organisation stage. that opportunity to.
take everybody in that journey to use a buzzword as best you can. Cause most likely right now what you've got is, as I was saying at the start of the episode, you've got individuals that have jumped on board and got excited to do bits and pieces of their work. But you've got to think more holistically across the organisation. How do you get that investment? How do you have a one speed kind of culture so that you don't have two speeds where you've got people who are those early adopters of running ahead and doing great things, but other people are not supported to make progress or to understand the technology. So now's a really good time from a priming perspective to be thinking about how you create that best human experience in your organisation. Cause you've, you've thought about how to do that proactively and thoughtfully. There's another priming piece that's needed as well. And that is At the moment when capacity is freed up in someone's day, they just fill it up with whatever. You achieve a deliverable or a task, you get it done. Your time is freed up. You finish a project, your time is freed up. You always find other stuff to fill up that space. There's a priming activity that's needed now on how do you repurpose that for activities that are needed in the future for critical thinking work for stuff that people are not doing today, but they need to do tomorrow. So it's about identifying some of those things that are needed in the future, but then also helping employees to see when their capacity or time is freed up. You can't just fill it up with anything. making images of cats riding bike. Yeah, you need to be really thoughtful around and planned around. What is it that I need to prioritise and do and focus on and put into this space that I now have. Cause that is not a common place for people to go to when their time is freedom. Yes, we're going to getting busy. It's not necessarily on the right things. Busyness. Busy. Whenever you ask somebody how they are, they say I'm busy. And it's often because we fill up our time with things without any really thoughtful planned prioritisation.
So we hope we've given you lots of ideas for this priming phase when you're in your organisation thinking about what to do to get the human and AI's experience working in service of the organisation and the customers for that organisation. So you get the outcomes. you get the productivity gains. Yeah. benefit from the technology. the beginning we talked about it takes time for the productivity gains to happen. You know, was 50 years for electricity. It will take time for this as well because there's things that are deeply embedded in the organisation that need to shift, but the leaders can do that. There's things that they can shift and start today. So we know the transition of intelligent technologies into the workplace is going to take time and to get the benefits of that, both from a technical perspective and from the human experience perspective that will absolutely take time. And that's why it's important to do the priming activities now in preparation for that, because we know AI is coming. It's not going away. If it's not already in your organisation in a large way, it will be soon and it'll be in your industry. And now's a great opportunity to think about those priming activities that you could be doing as a leader to set your people up for success and to get the benefits of productivity and the return on investment of intelligent technologies in the workplace. So thanks for listening. Thank you.
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