While AI can save expenses, what is the cost in terms of worker experience?
There are numerous advantages to implementing artificial intelligence in the workplace. Nevertheless, if human needs are neglected, moving too quickly might harm workers’ experiences at work.
Recently, 142 senior leaders in worker experience were invited to participate in a Forbes roundtable conversation organized in association with Natter, a business that leverages data analytics, intelligent matching, and proprietary video technology to collect ideas, opinions, and feedback at scale.
Executives were also invited to discuss their ideas on how artificial intelligence (AI) might affect human labor at work, as well as any potential consequences. Leaders in the workforce believe AI will boost output and innovation.
Simultaneously, they acknowledge growing concerns that AI can jeopardize the human experience if precautions and initiatives aren’t put in place, in addition to changing and decreasing our workload.
Gaining buy-in and trust
To achieve successful business outcomes, earning the workforce’s trust and support for AI is essential. Employees perceive their employers as roughly two times less human and sympathetic when AI capabilities are available, according to a TrustIDTM poll. Furthermore, employees who have a high level of trust in their employers are almost twice as likely to feel motivated and are 50% less likely to search for a new position.
Organizations can reap the benefits of AI by realizing that individual employees are rarely motivated by bottom-line benefits. Rather, leaders ought to safeguard and enhance the human experience while building a relationship of trust between their employees and the AI applications whose uptake is essential to their success.
There are four growing tensions in the workplace between human values and opportunity.
Research shows four tensions that arose, underscoring the promise of AI vs. the values of humans that may be at risk. We analyze those tensions here and provide recommendations to assist leaders in resolving them.
1. Inclusion vs. efficiency
Executives can’t wait to use AI to speed up repetitive jobs and relieve staff members of the administrative load. Although executives are excited about the potential for efficiency benefits, about one-third of the conversations raised concerns about the bias and inclusion issues associated with AI, indicating that the possibility of further entrenching systemic bias may temper their enthusiasm.
Going forward, leaders should train staff members to recognize and confront biases in AI and support this learning across departments and levels.
2. Ingenuity as opposed to diligence
Although there are many ways to assess the quality of work, the leaders in the study emphasized the value of hard labor and creative inspiration in producing high-quality work.
According to almost 70% of the CEOs we spoke with, AI will at least somewhat increase worker creativity by generating fresh concepts and inspiration that will raise the caliber of output.
However, 42% are worried that if AI is used too much, human diligence will be sacrificed, and high-quality work will lack correctness, thoroughness, and diversity of thinking.
To guarantee the moral application of AI and reduce risk to the caliber of their output, leaders can advance by creating procedures for reviewing the input and output quality of AI. It is important that this direction be uniform and integrated throughout the entire organization, encompassing the C-suite, HR, technology, and product teams.
3. Data privacy vs. personalization
AI-driven feedback loops have the potential to help executives (58%) understand their workforce better and make better decisions. However, greater access to employee data is necessary for scaled data-driven customization. This requirement is closely related to leaders’ primary concern—which is the moral application of AI for data security and privacy—which comes up in 56% of talks.
Using active listening technologies with features that help reduce risk to employee privacy and data security is one way that leaders can go forward.
4. Connection time versus connection quality
The influence of AI on human interaction is perhaps the most fundamental source of stress. In more than one-third of the talks, there was hope that AI will free up time for deep human connections. The concerns, however, have dampened this euphoria; according to 41% of CEOs, AI will lower the caliber of human connections. These leaders are concerned about an over-reliance on “the machine” in crucial situations that have historically been made memorable by “the human touch,” empathy motivated by humans, and the absence of technology.
By employing human-centered design research techniques and ethnography to find novel approaches to establish connections at crucial times, leaders can make progress. Businesses need to be ready for interactions to be increasingly machine-generated in order to maintain the high standard for what constitutes genuine human connections.
Organizations can reap the benefits of AI while safeguarding the human experience by taking into account and honoring the four tensions that may surface when it is used in the workplace.
AI integration should follow an experience-led methodology. Using a “humans with machines” strategy, according to leaders, fosters trust with artificial intelligence (AI). This method is characterized by protections to help assure more trustworthy computers, is molded by human-centered design, and is ultimately intended to empower employees for change.
In what ways is your company getting ready to implement AI in the workplace? Have the same conflicts risen for you? If yes, what steps are you going to take next?
(Tashia Bernardus)