Let us resist scaremongering and the bashing of company executives. Of the 40 to 55,000 job losses planned for the decade and announced by former BT Group chief Philip Jansen in 2023, the roll-out of Full Fibre accounted for over half. Some 10,000 layoffs were to come from digitisation and automation.

Still, the claim made to the Financial Times earlier this month by Jansen’s successor Allison Kirkby, that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) might by 2030 allow the telecoms giant to be “even smaller”, gives pause for thought.

Kirkby’s view that the group’s original ambitions “did not reflect the full potential of AI” shows how the technology is disrupting operations across the sector. Her words also raise general questions about how AI is recasting the lives of employees, customer experiences and society at large.

AI is no panacea

Thinking about the redundancies that AI is now causing across many industries, what is the full potential of AI? Many corporate decision-makers remain unsure.

Research by Orgvue suggests that over half of companies that fired people in favour of AI now regret the decision. Gartner predicts that by 2027 many businesses will shelve their plans to reduce customer-facing teams given how ‘agent-less’ staffing initiatives have failed to meet expectations.

Whilst Silicon Valley bullies, blackmails and bribes the world to jump on its bandwagon of artificial intelligence, executive teams are discovering – many to their cost and embarrassment – that AI is no panacea for the challenges of good performance.

The value that employees bring is complex and not easily quantified.

Four practical ways to make sense of AI

How, then, can organisations avoid the pitfalls of hasty implementation and instead make the technology work for them and their stakeholders?

1. Clarify your vision of ‘good’

Without doubt, AI is a force for disruptive change. Whilst we know what we are moving away from – our present circumstances – how clear are we on what we are moving toward? When not guided by a coherent vision of the future, AI strategies will be rudderless, ineffective or downright harmful.

A first step is to describe what ‘good’ looks like, by stating what your AI ambitions mean, in truth, for the workplace, employees’ jobs and lives, customers, and wider society. It is also important to explain what will be lost as the future unfolds. If diverse stakeholders cannot agree that your picture is enriching, then the plans may be unsound.

2. Think value, not cost

Silicon Valley’s AI discourse is dominated by the rhetoric of efficiency, speed and cost. But such strategies rarely yield long-term advantage. Worse, powered by AI, the relentless drive for efficiency risks creating workplaces, businesses and whole societies stripped of richness and meaning: few people want to be surrounded by bots.

Spreadsheets will always favour AI over human resources, so cost metrics skew the conversation. Instead, explore how AI both adds to, and subtracts from, value the business exists to create.

Trade-offs are a factor in this decision-making process: to illustrate, redundancies ease the financials yet mean a loss for individuals, their families and society. Where is the gain for such stakeholders that offsets a firm’s “opportunity” to be smaller?

3. Automate tasks, don’t replace people

The value that employees bring is complex and not easily quantified. Consider, for example, the hotel doorman, whose role is not simply to open doors but to champion the human experiences that guests appreciate; this ‘invisible’ responsibility secures rack rates and repeat custom. 

Competitors can replicate the work of your bots and, unlike the contributions of human employees, AI outputs bring neither meaning nor stickiness to relationships with customers and employees. As such, questions about replacing jobs likely miss hidden value and are almost certainly premature.

Ask colleagues and customers, rather, what tasks they find tedious and would like to automate. This helps secure buy-in and reveals practical ways forward.

The world cannot cherry-pick the upside of cost-efficiency and neglect AI’s impact on employees.

4. Let your AI strategy evolve

Decisions made about AI today will not suffice for the long term: workplaces are complex, roles evolve, people grow, markets shift and appetites change. Technology also advances at pace. We cannot know, as Kirkby intimates, the full potential – or, let us add, the full harm – of AI.

Small steps reveal the surest path to beneficial use of new technology. Again, involve stakeholders in a dialogue, not a one-off research exercise, about how automation may be used to augment value.

The important thing during early disruption is to turn the corner, as we call it, and give everyone a more assured view of the future, which is as yet unknown. Learn from experience as you go along.

Call for leadership strength

The world cannot cherry-pick the upside of cost-efficiency and neglect AI’s impact on employees, customers or (especially for large firms) society. Thoughtful executive teams will bring intelligence, empathy and care to think through consequences, relate to people and make sound choices.

A friend of mine who runs technology for a global bank last week said, “Most AI strategies are confidently designed on a spreadsheet, and that’s a disaster for everyone”. No one can make full sense of AI in the areas above, for definitive answers are impossible. What matters is that we ask the right questions.

And as the world grapples with this complex yet vital reality, I wish for Kirkby – and her peers across global industry – imagination, courage and, not least, luck, as they shoulder the burden to create value from AI.