We have become enamoured with everything Artificial Intelligence (AI) can do to improve our businesses.
It provides the potential to eliminate all sorts of tasks that somehow seem to fill our time. As both the technology and our understanding of AI develop, we quickly learn that there are some things these machines cannot do. These tasks are often critical to our jobs.
I would ask, are you doing those things with the time that AI is freeing from other tasks?
We will fail without people filling these gaps, regardless of how well we leverage AI. We will fail our customers, fail to achieve our goals, and fail our people!
What are some things that AI can’t do that are so critical for humans to focus on?
The first, most glaring area is emotional intelligence and empathy. Business, including selling, is about interacting and engaging with people.
How are we connecting with people and how they feel about their actions? Research suggests that at least 60 per cent of planned purchases end in ‘no decision made’. The underlying reasons for this have nothing to do with our businesses.
It is about how people ‘feel’ about the change. Are they doing the right thing for themselves and what they want to achieve? Significant research has been done on people’s lack of commitment to change and how it impacts business.
These are human issues that can only be addressed by humans working with humans. Building trust and relationships underlies all of this.
We build trust with each other and betray trust; however, trust is core to everything we do.
AI is very weak at complex problem-solving. Complex problems are never static. Perhaps the best way to visualise problems in the real world is using an amoeba.
Amoebas are constantly changing, shifting shape and direction.
Because they are always changing, we can never define what an amoeba looks like. That’s what problems in the real world look like - evolving. As we learn more about the issue, things change.
The more people involved, the perspectives of the problems, their impact, and what should be done constantly change. Ambiguity underlies everything we see in complex problem solving. Regardless of how many times we solve certain categories of problems, each is nuanced and different.
In helping customers understand and address change, we must be sensitive to the constant changes and nuances underlying every initiative. We must help our customers and our people successfully navigate these issues.
None of these problems exist in isolation. Each exists in a larger strategic context, unique to each customer.
They exist in the context of the overall business strategies, market dynamics, competitive landscape. They exist in the context of organisational cultures and values. They exist in the context of the expectations of each other’s customers, employees, partners, shareholders, and communities.
What about innovation, creativity, and critical thinking? While AI can help us see patterns and things that were difficult or impossible to see in the past, we are faced with the question, " What do we do about them?”
How do we combine disparate and disconnected ideas to discover new and novel approaches? No one imagined this, yet when we see it, it becomes obvious. It is the human imagination, curiosity and creativity that underlie every change we make.
Then, we start thinking about leadership, motivation, and organisational development. How do we inspire and create a vision for what we do and where we go? How do we align different people with varied interests around a purpose, mission, and goals?
AI is great at responding to what we ask it to do; however, so much of what we do is unscripted. We must be agile and imaginative enough to understand and respond to these things.
When you consider how we work individually, organisationally, with our customers, and with others, you realise that AI isn’t good at many other things. It helps us with bits and pieces; however, it can’t put it ‘all together’ at the right moment.
I’m excited about the future and what AI can do to help us in business. I leverage AI tools daily, saving time, completing tedious tasks that I hate doing, and sometimes giving me new ideas.
That said, what worries me about the collective obsession with AI is that it focuses on what it can do, overlooking its shortcomings. This leads me to question whether we have the skills and capabilities to pick up the slack.
Until we address these issues, we will never leverage AI the way it could be.
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