AI Wont Save Your Company: Human Creativity Will
Nir Bashan for Forbes Magazine
In my work with different groups across the country, I uncover a commonality found in almost in every one I work with. No matter what industry. From the manufacturing industry to the financial services industry, the same sentiment comes up often when people at work are stuck. And that sentiment is often some variation of this:We need better technology. And we need AI.
But what we are really looking for is not about more tech, or even AI. What we are really looking for are more solutions to issues we are facing at work. Technology is not a substitute for human ingenuity and the pursuit of solutions, but it can often masquerade as such. Tempting us to shore only to snag us on an unseen reef.
Here are three ways that can truly help you and your organization forever shift the balance away from a tech dependency and onto a solution mindset. No matter what the flavor of the moment is in the technology world.
Call Out The Hype
The technology sector is literally in love with themselves. With a Public Relations system that was once reserved for Hollywood’s long gone glitz and glam, the tech industry has taken up the void left by Hollywood of the most self-congratulatory industry on earth.
They think that their tech is so good, so important and so amazing that it can cure all of humanities issues in one fell swoop. Remember blockchain? Or even IOT, The Internet of Things? That was supposed to bring on a foundational shift that would forever change our lives. Our toaster oven was going to be connected to the internet! And somehow that would make it “smart” according to the ceaseless PR machine. But what happened turned out to be more hype than fact. I’m sure there are folks out there who love that their toaster has an app, but most of us still burn our toast the old fashioned way: by turning the knob too steep.
So next time a vendor is demonstrating that latest software that they are telling you that you must have or you are being pitched on an AI implementation that will change work forever, call out the hype. Ask for details. Ask for how things actually work rather than getting caught up in the frenzy of adding the letters “AI” to anything and everything without substance. Calling out the hype and not falling into the trap of blindly following what everyone else is doing can be an amazing boost to creativity and innovation, not that software that promises to automate your thinking for you.
AI’s Overpromise
You guessed it: the AI revolution just well may be overhyped.
A recent study has shown that most employees think that AI has over promised on its potential. Much talk about the Fourth Industrial Revolution leaves little room but to assume that AI is yet another bubble. And according to Harvard’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, this hype is not easy to reverse.
There will be generations of folks who believe that the AI systems are ripe for offloading creativity and innovation to, and that the AI will take care of that for us. But there is nothing that can be further from the truth. And the damage is real.CEO: C-suite news, analysis, and advice for top decision makers right to your inbox.
We need to rely on ourselves and create habits to nurture an environment where creativity and innovation can take hold. And often that means shutting down the phones, tech, AI and laptops and engaging hands-on in our business or with our customers.
One thing that anyone can do today to overcome AI’s overpromise of salvation is to do things in person again. While I know that you are triple booked Monday to Friday, taking the time to actually do things in person yield results that are the cornerstone of creativity and innovation. It is when we meet our staff, customers, co-workers and vendors face to face, we are able to overcome challenges, come up with creative solutions, close sales, build relationships and overcome adversity. And it turns out that the science backs this. So a bit more in-person time can yield such great returns if we only steer away from AI’s overpromise and do things in person again.
The Myth of Doing More
Some of the most recent studies on AI at work have shown that the advent of AI has lengthened the work day, instead of shortened it. The study found that AI “intensified” work, often with workers feeling that their workload has grown and are now stressed out from both existing things that they have to deal with plus newfound AI based tasks on top. In short, there is a myth that AI will allow us to do more, and it is propagated by the PR machine of the tech world to serve its own self interests.
The myth of AI helping us do more reminds me of the rush a few years ago to worship at the alter of multitasking. We saw many people rush to defend how multitasking can allow us to do more with less time, but that overlooked the inconvenient truth: Multitasking does not work. It often creates fragmented and uncompleted work that appear on the outside as impressive but is hopelessly incomplete. AI promises that same degree of multitasking to excel but may not allow us to complete tasks to any degree of quality.
To counter this myth of doing more, do better instead. Take on less work but complete it more meaningfully. Doing less, but doing it better, far outweighs the mess of doing more but not completing what you have started. Decrease the quantity of your work in order to improve the quality of your work. AI promises to do both, but we must balance accomplishments of tasks with the quantity of tasks in order to excel at work.
Technology can only get us so far. At best, technology is a tool that we can use to implement our own ideas and thoughts for better solutions. Yet we end up falling in love with the promise of technology to make our lives so much easier. And in some cases, technology does make things easier, but we must remember to use it is a tool, one of many available to us, to get where we need to go. It is not the tool itself, but how we use it that makes all the difference.
