For some time, Elon Musk has said artificial intelligence (AI) will replace all jobs, save for some that are ‘kinda like a hobby’. If this is true, let us all go home and enjoy Silicon Valley’s utopia of synthetic entertainment, indulge the thoughts and feelings permitted by our smartphones, and await universal nothingness.
Until this happens, however, boardrooms, executive teams and entire workforces must figure out how to benefit from AI. One thing is certain: the technology will shape, even if it does not ‘transform’ per the California dream, every workplace.
Who should own the AI strategy?
For organisations in every sector, making sense of AI is a tough, vital and urgent priority. Who should lead the charge? The nature of the technology brings to mind several front-runners.
Silicon Valley
Big Tech has, without merit or mandate, positioned itself as chief technology officer to the world. Silicon Valley is now straining to call the shots on companies’ AI plans. (After all, someone has to pay for its data centres, cover the cost of power and fund payouts to settle lawsuits.)
Still, would you let the fellow who leased you a cement mixer build your house? No. So why allow Silicon Valley to dictate your AI strategy? Big Tech’s thinking and products are not the only – and (with other interests at stake) may not be the best – way forward.
Explore for yourself how AI might augment your own value chain.
Finance
Money is a key factor behind automation and workplace ambitions more broadly (as we see in everyday budget wrangles). Under the banner of ‘efficiency’, AI has the potential to streamline processes, replace costly labour and shift how financial capital is deployed.
Still, spreadsheets are simplistic, and AI strategies skewed toward financials, notably cost savings, may not account for the often hidden value that your people create through their jobs.
Consider how a nurse settles anxious patients whilst injecting drugs, or how the hotel doorman sustains rack rates through guest relationships, and not simply by opening a door. An ‘efficient’ AI interviewer may cause the best candidates to walk away: recruiters do more than trot out questions.
Technology
AI is a technology play, so perhaps IT should own your strategy? Indeed, the focal point for many automation plans today is the technology department, not least as this team often takes care of, if not procurement, then relationships with vendors.
What matters with AI, however, is not the tool, which is increasingly commodified, but how its use affects lives, identities, experiences, roles, objectives, activities, outcomes and, ultimately, value across the workplace.
With so many pathways, unknowns and risks, AI strategy is not a question of technology.
HR
The pervasive impact of AI on the workplace and people supports a case for locating AI strategy within HR. After all, this department is accountable for maximising the value of human capital and, balance sheet aside, ensuring your employees are well and productive.
If AI strategy is to be owned by any one function, its capacity to recast the world of work suggests the responsibility may sit with HR, curator of human experiences within the workplace.What if no one owns AI?
Should AI strategy, then, be owned by HR, with support from the chief executive to involve other senior managers in advancing an agreed vision? Whilst the idea makes more sense than many alternatives, the answer is no.
Why? In short, the thinking behind project ‘strategy’ and ‘ownership’ emerges from change methods that have persisted for over 100 years and yet fail us almost every time.
How top-down change fails
Where change is ‘done to’ people from the outside, usually from above, anxiety rises, resistance forms and everyone struggles to move. The status quo reasserts itself and the organisation remains stuck in its old ways.
Top-down bureaucratic change, which revolves around centralised project control and formal strategic plans, fails to account for both the complexity of modern work and the employee interests for which HR teams have battled long and hard.
Managers’ designs, milestones and plans crowd out employees’ discovery of a shifting and unknowable environment. In being told what to do, team members lose their autonomy: motivation falls, creativity erodes and wellbeing is put at risk.
When change stalls, the communication campaigns that invariably follow, again usually top-down in nature, rarely persuade anyone to give meaningful ‘buy-in’. Exhaustion, cynicism and disengagement come next.
Fresh model for culture change
If the usual approach is so broken, what is a viable way forward?
At Marble Brook, we encourage organisations to move from ‘design then deliver’ to create conditions where teams discover new ways of working through small, reversible and yet strategic shifts.
This method secures involvement and agency at all levels and across functions, promotes intrinsic motivation and allows everyone to do their best work.
As HR professionals know, if you look after and give people good work to do, they perform well – in this case, to find out how AI can, and cannot, advance the workplace.
This meaningful participation is especially relevant with automation and other shifts that raise (often unvoiced) questions about the purpose, identity, value and role of people at work. Otherwise, anxiety kicks in and nothing changes without a bloody fight.
Novel responsibilities
In inviting team members to be more involved, heads of function and managers step back from their anachronistic duty to ‘manage change’. Novel responsibilities help everyone grapple with the complexity of modern work and the demands of an ever-evolving environment.
Heads of function set direction
Executives and senior managers clarify the value that is intended by (in this case) AI, and give all team members an unambiguous mandate. Leaders provide resources, not least time to experiment, and, of course, act in ways that promote the value sought.
Line managers promote dialogue
For line managers to encourage open conversation across teams promotes agency and creativity. Managers support their colleagues to discover how AI aids or constrains efforts to create value. They also hold everyone to account and see that timely decisions are made.
Team members explore what is possible
Team members are not passive recipients of strategy or new ways of working. They make time to explore what is possible with AI – not random tinkering, but through cohesive experiments across the value chain. They make recommendations and own shifts in practice.
HR’s mandate for AI
As in other departments, HR must see how AI fits into its own workflows.
A yet more vital role is to champion human value through today’s tech-led shifts in the workplace. HR must press for distributed change that empowers everyone to grow, harness motivation and skills, and thereby co-create solutions optimised for future work.
If you would like more ideas on how the usual approaches to culture change let everyone down, and what you can do differently, download our executive guide Rip Up the Rule Book, with eight pitfalls to avoid as you strive for new ways of working.
