AI is developing fast. In the last two years alone, AI has gone from a prediction tool that helped identify trends and manipulate data to provide forecasting for farmers and wholesaler/retailers, to a creation and action tool that can simulate human performance, but much more powerfully and infinitely faster.
This was the what we learned in the first few minutes of this fascinating webinar hosted by Uspire and delivered by Alex Haitoglou from Ovida, the Human+AI leadership development platform.
Elephant
One of the first thing that Alex addresses is the elephant in the room ... how is AI going to impact the job market. Inevitably, AI will result in job losses, but it will also result in job creation. But, the skills required for the new jobs are different to those of the jobs being made obsolete ... and that is the challenge for leaders - how do you guide your people through that inevitable change curve, which is probably closer than we think.
This brings into sharp focus what kind of challenge AI brings to organisations. Rather than AI being a tech issue, it is a human adaptabilioty issue. As AI progresses and becomes more powerful and adaptable, it is the human interface, not the tech interface, that is much harder to upgrade. How do we create a culture of adaptability that supports our people through this transition?
45% performance improvement
A common question from leaders is how much does AI actually improve performance. Well, a team of very clever consultants from the top institutions looked at this question and after observing work behaviours of a group using AI, pitched against a control group who weren't using AI, they deduced that the AI group had a performance improvement of 45%.
To put that into context, the whole of the industrial revolution, which took 150 years to make its mark, improved productivity by 25%. Yikes!
Use cases
At our recent LIVE event in Manchester we talked about the impact of AI and how businesses need to anticipate its impact and future-proof their growth. One defining statistic is that of all public company failures, 60% was becuase of strategic failure i.e. not anticipating future trends and adapting the business model to suit.
A case in point is the impact AI is having on businesses in the customer service space. AI-powered customer service providers have wiped off 75% from the value of existing customer service providers. And as Alex suggests below, the reason is not cost. It is because AI can do that function infinitely better ... smoother, faster and with resulting big shifts in customer satisfaction ... Octopus shifted the dial on customer satisfaction from 62% to 80% by replacing their email team with AI - a concern for leaders of organisations facing strategic threats.
How are you adapting to retain a competitve advantage, what changes to your business model is required to hold on to your reason for existing. How will you remain relevant?
AI implementation - a process
As with any change projects, AI implementation needs to be done so with planning and consideration:
- Assess - what are your most important priorities in the business?
- Discover - what solutions are available?
- Ideate & Prioritise - prioritise after your assessment and establishing what is possible
- Develop - create the solution identified as most suited to your business
- Implement - implement a trial, review and roll-out
This is the process Ovida are using to implement AI projects with varying complexity, from simple ChatGPT solutions for content production to more complicated systems for process overhaul.
Uniquely Human
With such proof that AI-enforced change is inevitable, we do need to debate what is unqiuely human and cannot be replaced by AI. The obvious answer is the empathy that can only be felt by a human - the soft skills that are so important in leadership. The problem is, as demonstrated by the stats that Alex shares below, we are doing really badly at employing these soft skills - an uptick in leadership skills is vital if AI is going to be successfully implemented, otherwise such dramatic change could cause significant people issues.
Did it really just do that ...?!
To show just how good AI has become at "creation", check out this quick demo ... it will blow your mind!
The full webinar is available to watch on demand ... check it out here.