What’s in it for me? Discover how artificial intelligence will change the way businesses work.
Artificial Intelligence, or AI for short, is the next big thing in the world of business.
It’s already making inroads into the fields of data entry and recruitment, and its impact is set to grow exponentially in the coming years.
But with every advance in the field, leaders and employees alike raise fresh concerns.
Will AI replace workers and render most employees redundant?
Can algorithms really be trusted?
And how do you manage a workplace composed of both AI and human employees?
These blinks open a window on the ways AI will change organizations in years to come.
In these blinks, you’ll learn why AI is a good manager; whether algorithms can truly lead; and how AI collaborated with a long-dead composer.
If you’re a fan of sci-fi movies, the notion of intelligent machines probably worries you.
The AI revolution is coming, whether we like it or not.
In film after film, we’ve seen humankind develop super-smart robots only for them to rebel against their creators, with disastrous consequences every time.
Surely, you might think, these stories contain a lesson for us.
But if they do, it’s not one that’s been heeded; a quick glance at the world of business will tell you that.
Year after year, artificial intelligence has been growing smarter – and industry leaders, eager to maximize their profits, have been paying close attention to these new, intelligent machines.
The key message here is: The AI revolution is coming, whether we like it or not.
So how will artificial intelligence change the world?
To answer that question, we first need to look at what exactly the term AI refers to.
Put simply, AI describes a program that swallows data as its raw material and issues conclusions as its finished product.
To do this, AI uses algorithms, a system of mathematical calculations that takes the data you enter, runs some computations on it, and produces useful findings as a result.
So far, this all sounds fairly innocuous, right?
Well, think again.
In 2016, a computer program developed by Google beat the world champion at Go, a Chinese board game even more complex than chess.
For many, this was a watershed moment.
People used to think that excelling at Go required a human touch – but Google’s AlphaGo program proved them wrong.
After this victory, many businesspeople began to wonder whether AI might outstrip human judgment in their own fields.
It didn’t take long to find the answer.
Just as AI was able to choose the most strategic moves in a game of Go, it’s also able to indicate the course that businesses should take to achieve optimal results.
That’s why current estimates predict that AI will add $13 trillion to the global economy over the next decade, changing the way businesses are managed for good.
With money like that on the line, the adoption of AI seems inevitable.
But what will its human impact be, besides enriching investors?
AI is poised to enter the world of management.
What does the word management suggest to you?
Bureaucracy?
Paperwork?
Stifling rules and regulations that nobody wants to follow?
It’s easier to understand what management involves when you contrast it with leadership.
Both involve directing people.
But whereas leadership involves charisma, drive, and vision, management is more concerned with supervising day-to-day tasks – in other words, with making sure everything is kept ticking along.
These days, many employees actually feel that the workplace is overmanaged – even managers themselves aren’t very fond of their jobs.
But things are about to change profoundly.
The key message here is: AI is poised to enter the world of management.
It just so happens that the very things that make management dull are the same things AI is designed for.
Think about it.
What exactly do managers do?
Well, they make specific, quantifiable plans.
They budget and set standards.
They check in on employees, making sure they’re hitting their targets and meeting their deadlines.
They see to it that everything is running smoothly.
What’s more, they work with a lot of data.
Managing performance involves processing and evaluating data relating to each employee: targets met, sales made, days missed.
Day after day, the information piles up.
AI is perfectly designed to make sense of the huge amount of data produced in the modern workplace.
Instead of relying on the expensive, slow, and sometimes inaccurate data management humans carry out, work of this kind can be easily offloaded onto AI.
Once AI has interpreted this data, it can also issue automated responses based on its findings.
To take one example, JPMorgan Chase, a powerful bank, uses algorithms to track employees and check whether they’re acting in line with compliance regulations.
Some companies even use algorithms to track employees’ job satisfaction and to predict the likelihood that they’ll resign!
What’s clear is that AI is uniquely suited to many of the tasks that managers currently perform.
But what about leadership?
Is that uniquely human or can even that be outsourced to machines?
Leadership is a quality that everyone wants to possess.
The ability to lead is beyond the powers of AI.
The ability to influence others, to motivate your peers, and to make wise decisions for the communal good is a rare and desirable power.
But is it a characteristic that AI can possess?
If algorithms can work as managers, does that mean they can lead, too?
A leader provides others with a vision – ideally, with a vision so compelling that it imbues employees’ daily work with meaning and inspires them to work with real enthusiasm.
Is this something that AI can do too?
The key message here is: The ability to lead is beyond the powers of AI.
For a number of reasons, AI just can’t lead.
Whereas the functions of management are well suited to algorithms, the functions of leadership seem uniquely suited to real human beings.
Why?
Let’s break it down.
At its most basic, leadership consists of the ability to influence others, or to convince them to act as you’d like them to.
This means that it depends on social skills at least as much as it does on intelligent decision-making.
So even though AI can make informed decisions based on huge databases of information, it needs human help to inspire employees.
In other words, AI lacks the aptitude to turn acute judgments into stimulating visions.
AI can produce sound judgment, but it ultimately can’t win hearts.
This isn’t just speculation.
Consumer research suggests that people are distrustful of AI: in fact, only 4 percent of people surveyed in the US said that they’d trust AI to hire employees.
Why is that?
Well, for precisely the same reasons that AI would falter in a leadership position: it’s intelligent enough, but it’s unable to inspire confidence and win trust.
In short, it might be able to inform leaders – but it can never lead in its own right.
So, there are some limits to what AI can do in the workplace.
In the future, humans will need to rely on their soft skills, like empathy, agility, and creativity.
Even though it’s adept at managing, it can’t lead.
But there’s more to organizations than just leaders and managers; there are whole ranges of work we haven’t even touched on yet.
Take the financial sector.
Bit by bit, banks are replacing their employees with AI, especially those whose tasks are mostly mechanical and calculative.
Does that suggest that the advent of AI will make everyone below the level of leadership obsolete?
Besides leading, is there anything else left for humans to do?
The key message here is: In the future, humans will need to rely on their soft skills, like empathy, agility, and creativity.
The human touch that’s necessary for real leadership is valuable at every level of an organization.
In fact, the more business operations are automated, the more soft skills will come to be valued in employees.
After all, if AI is making inroads into almost every other domain, what’s left for us to capitalize on except what’s uniquely human?
Job advertisements already bear this out.
Even in banks, where mathematical and analytical skills once ruled the day, advertisements give increasing prominence to the social skills that candidates should demonstrate.
In fact, it’s been estimated that demand for employees with emotional intelligence, the ability to recognize and manage the emotions of others, will increase sixfold over the next few years!
There are skills, besides emotional intelligence and social know-how, that will also come at a premium in the AI workplace.
Take creativity and agility, for example.
AI is intelligent and can give you precise, swift, and informed answers to a number of questions.
But its answers are rarely what we call creative.
True innovation – the development of novel products, services, insights, and approaches – looks set to remain human for the foreseeable future.
AI also struggles to be agile.
Agility, we know, refers to the ability to adapt to new circumstances quickly – in other words, it’s a kind of high-speed flexibility.
It can sometimes be difficult for us humans, but for AI, it can prove a real obstacle.
Look at what happens when developers create algorithms that can play video games.
When everything’s going according to plan, these algorithms can beat the very best humans hands down.
But change one minor setting, and watch what happens: the human player will quickly learn and adapt.
The AI, on the other hand, will flounder.
It’s these few skills, which AI still struggles to grasp, that will distinguish human employees in the future.
In 2018, the tech giant Huawei arranged a surprising performance of Franz Schubert’s Symphony no.
The story of workplace AI should be one of collaboration, not replacement.
8.
Why was it surprising?
Well, Schubert began the symphony almost 200 years ago, but he died after he completed its first two movements.
Yet somehow, this orchestra managed to play four.
That’s where Huawei came in; the company used AI technology to analyze Schubert’s style and predict what his missing movements might have sounded like!
Engineers fed the AI program 90 of the composer’s finished compositions, and let it analyze the two existing movements of Symphony no.
8.
In a process of human-AI collaboration, a contemporary composer then refined the output into two complete and entirely new movements.
The key message here is: The story of workplace AI should be one of collaboration, not replacement.
Huawei’s ambitious musical venture points toward the ideal future of AI, which should be working in tandem with humans without replacing us entirely.
In a sense, then, AI will hopefully become a kind of trusted and super-efficient coworker.
Overseeing the collaboration between this new colleague and regular employees will fall to business leaders.
Their task will be to manage the new diversity of this human-AI workplace.
Delegation will be central to ensuring that this diversity is a success.
After all, if AI is going to be of any use, it must be entrusted with the tasks it’s most suited to.
This is easier said than done, however.
Leaders risk offending employees with the suggestion that some jobs are better left to AI.
Luckily, this isn’t inevitable.
Leaders need to remind employees that AI is a collaborator, not a competitor.
By letting algorithms take care of crunching data and issuing verdicts, human employees can make use of their creativity and soft skills.
In other words, AI should be understood as a collaborator that frees us up to be more human.
The Korean car manufacturer Hyundai showed just how fruitful human-machine collaborations can be.
Instead of replacing their line workers with robots, they developed wearable, robotic exoskeletons for them instead.
These exoskeletons made heavy lifting much easier for employees, augmenting their abilities instead of replacing them.
Leaders hoping to create an AI-friendly workplace could learn a lot from this approach.
Workers need to overcome a few prejudices before they can make the most of AI.
Time after time, research has shown that employees work best when they feel empowered.
When workers feel as though they have an important role in their organization and can make their own decisions about how to fulfill it, both employee satisfaction and performance go up.
It’s a win-win.
But navigating empowerment in the age of AI can be tricky.
Many workers take the emergence of artificial intelligence as an affront, or as a threat to their independence and livelihoods.
This is understandable, to a degree.
AI is new and challenging, and challenges aren’t always pleasant.
It’s the job of organization leaders to understand workers’ concerns and to help them to get over their initial opposition to AI.
The key message here is: Workers need to overcome a few prejudices before they can make the most of AI.
Researchers consistently find that employees display algorithmic aversion – a technical way of saying that we distrust the findings of AI, even when artificial intelligence is known to be fast and accurate.
This poses several problems for organizations hoping to implement AI.
At the most fundamental level, if employees refuse to accept that AI can be of use, there’s no point introducing it to a firm at all.
After all, what use is a super-intelligent system that no one bothers to use?
So, if an organization wants to take advantage of AI, it needs to make sure its employees are on board.
And to do so, it needs to tackle this algorithmic aversion.
One of the most important ways of doing this is by explaining the way AI works.
That doesn’t mean workers need to grasp the precise calculations algorithms run through in their analyses.
They just need to understand, broadly, what data the program makes use of, how it uses it, and why its results are trustworthy.
When employees realize that AI isn’t an impenetrable and incomprehensible black box they’re far more likely to trust it.
Secondly, leaders should emphasize that, although AI is indeed intelligent, it isn’t infallible; like regular employees, it gets things wrong from time to time.
Workers should be asked not to lose faith in AI just because of a single hiccup.
As is true of any employee’s work, what matters is our performance on aggregate – not the few times we happen to slip up.
Final summary
AI is already well-equipped to take over many managerial functions, but true, inspiring leadership is likely to remain a human domain.
To make the most of artificial intelligence, businesses should strive to cultivate an atmosphere of collaboration – with AI taking care of automatable tasks and humans increasingly using their creativity and soft skills.
Got feedback?
We’d love to hear what you think about our content!
Just drop an email to remember@blinkist.
com with Leadership by Algorithm as the subject line and share your thoughts!
What to read next: Humanity Works, by Alexandra Levit The blinks you’ve just finished focused on the ways AI will shape the workplace of the future, but they’re not exhaustive.
Alexandra Levit’s Humanity Works tackles a similar issue in gripping detail.
Examining the ways that the world of work will change in the coming years, Levit outlines the future of the gig economy, the transformative effect of new generations of workers, and actionable approaches to integrating technology and employees in the workplace of the future.
Head over to our blinks to Humanity Works to find out more.