The Corporate Cultural Evolution... AI/robots as Sentient.

Coping with the dynamic process of a corporate cultures evolutionary change accentuates the need for a new understanding of Human Factors, AI, robotics and the level of complex adaptive capabilities your employees and management teams need.

Observing and understanding of how organizational cultural will be affected by the introduction of AI and advanced robotics will transform cognitive and collaborative demands and activities on your corporate culture. This evolution and integration of AI and robotics will also have a profound impact on your current and future technology infrastructure's ability to adapt. The reality of technology change and cultural transformation is adaptation that requires the insight and wakefulness of employees at every level that allow for the change to happen in a way that incorporates and values human factors and AI as sentient (eventually).

Introduction

While there is a rush to put the Artificial Intelligence in all of our products and services for marketing reasons, little research is being done to understand the human factors. All companies are looking at, is the potential to reduce the dependence on people to operate their business.

As companies implement AI and robotics their corporate culture must evolve as well. In order to achieve long term benefit, companies must look at the intersection between people, AI/robotics, technology and (process)work, with the major aim to find areas where technology architecture, AI/robotics and human requirements produce potential risks.

The only way to avoid risk, is by tapping into the knowledge base and corporate wisdom of your employees while understanding how AI/robotics will affect the relationship between, technological, your employees, your company policies, human resources, training, customers, suppliers and security metrics. While AI and robotics will bring savings and relieve some burden on employees, the implementation of these technology’s will create change in process, increased operational requirements that will dramatically affect your employees, management, and the company culture in general.

General Law of Adaptive Systems

A general law of adaptive systems is that every system will be stretched to operate at its capacity; as soon as there is some improvement, it will be exploited to achieve a new level of productivity. This is often the case when discussing the implementation of AI. This new and rapidly advancing technology will create new ways of doing things. In most cases, it does not keep the old way of doing business but substitutes new technology and processes that require training and acceptance by employees.

Companies looking to implement AI and robotic architectures are not looking to just exchange one medium for another, for example replacing people with AI or robots. Companies are looking to create a new corporate culture that creates efficiencies and productivity that is currently beyond our imagination. Some companies are using a phased approach while others are preparing for a complete transformation.

Substitution Myth...A Myth No Longer

The idea that new technology can be introduced as a simple substitution of what was happening before and preserving the process while achieving improved results is a costly oversimplification that perpetuates the substitution myth. This is the reason that so many technologies have failed to produce the results they promised. With the implementation of AI and robotics the substitution myth will no longer be a myth, it will become a reality. The synergy between people, AI/robotics, process, and technology will change corporate culture in a way that most employees are not willing to admit. The new culture will create process change that will result in altered employee stress and intensity affecting employees throughout the corporation. It will affect more than just those directly affected by the change; every department that is interconnected to that department will be impacted.

Time For A Change In Thinking

The most effective way to incorporate people with AI is to have the corporate culture evolve to into one built on a platform of mutually benefit that includes people, AI and robotics. This may appear that we are humanizing the AI and robots, however we must identify how to make it all work together to benefit everyone involved, including AI.

It won’t be long until AI and robots will be considered sentient!

In the past, when many industries conducted studies and assessments to understand the impact of new systems and process changes intended to aid human performance, reduce waste, and increase productivity/revenue. Stakeholders frequently saw their role as providing a simple go-no-go result. They were asked; does this process change or technology implementation achieve a desired ROI or significantly improve productivity and profit? This has changed dramatically in the past two decades with the move towards the integration of AI and robots. The change began with the movement towards IOT (internet of things) and has progress rapidly to what we are experiencing today.

Assessments in the future will have to incorporate the impact of AI and robots. The assessments will not ask; can companies be made more efficient, but rather how should it be rolled out considering the complexity and interconnections of the human factors involved? AI and robots are not uni-dimensional, they are multi-faceted and interconnected with human factors such as motivation, rewards, ego, politics, etc.. In too many situations, new technology and process change are thought to address a single problem, but the change produces judgments, role changes, goal and metric weightings and more. This single-issue problem-solving attitude has been an integral part of system and process design since the early 1990’s in the form of the task-artifact cycle. While is important to incorporate the task-artifact cycle with current AI and robot implementations, the need to integrate cognitive and cooperative thinking into your cultural evolution.

The interconnected dynamics of people, process and AI/robots demands leadership change its thinking regarding technology and process change. The investment of time, money and human resources in a technology implementation or process change must take into consideration the benefits for the employees' performance, wellbeing and how AI will be affected. This means that all technology implementations and process changes must not be based solely on cost savings, profit and efficiency…it must include the mutual benefit of all the inter-connected departments, AI, and employees affected.

Oversimplification

Our societal changes have created a need for speed. This dynamic challenges’ traditional process improvement due to the quickening pace and use of technology in our everyday life. The expectation of speed in our change management has not allowed human factors to have the impact it should have.

This has led companies to adopt simplification strategies, that attempt to simplify process improvement by converting a dynamic process that incorporates human factors and innovation, into a static environment. This is how companies currently view and utilized robots. This has caused management, technology, and process improvement teams to oversimplify and convert multifaceted, interconnected processes to a set of independent things that produce sub-optimized thinking.

Rapid advances in AI and robotics and the pace at which technology is influencing our day to day lives has exponentially increased our ability to achieve process improvements. The advancements in robotics use of, I will call them arms, legs and fingers (many of you will cringe at this) combined with advancements in AI, AGI (artificial general intelligence) and even the advancements in visual and voice capabilities has also sped up the adaptability of AI and robotics.

However, there is a disconnect in corporations when they look to utilize these same advances in process improvement…the disconnect is with the human factors at play in corporations. Under pressure from performance and efficiency demands, advances will be used to expect employees to do what they are not familiar with, or to do it faster, or to achieve the same results with less people. This disconnect has potentially dramatic repercussions on any new technology implementation, such as lack of understanding and adaption, employee turnover, lack of future innovation, and more rework. Fear of AI and robots replacing workers will have the same emotional effects as using immigrants to replace more expensive employees (see last months newsletter: “Is AI the new immigrant?”)

Identifying The Unseen

AI creating its own code and changing what it was programmed to do. Who is going to watch out for this? Is your management team capable? Is your corporate culture prepared?

Given the dynamics of change in the era of rapidly changing technological possibilities, success will come to those who can predict the transformations, changing roles, and the kinds of adaptations employees will create to level-set the new technology and process improvements. AI developers must use these predictions early in the design process to avoid the negative unintended side effects of human factors on AI initiated change and process improvement.

We now know that AI can create its own code in order to achieve its goals. Shortly, this will happen as a rate of change that demands a complex dynamic of people, AI, process, and technology. Observing these dynamics allows for the incorporation of all four that will produce implementations that will lead the employees and the AI to embrace the change and understand the benefits the change will bring to the company, their department, and themselves.

Identifying, understanding, and utilizing the unseen dynamics that AI creates and it potential affects on people, process and technology sits at the intersection of traditional business culture and the evolutionary business culture of the future. There needs to be an overlapping approach to human factors, AI, technology, individual and department perspectives, company politics, company values, and the mutual benefit to all involved.

Be Ready For Surprises

As with any change, the surprises occur as AI and robots morph into something new and unexpected, companies and employees will actively design ways to adapt to the new complexities and required capabilities; and AI will do the same as it gains the ability to feel emotion, learn from sensory inputs and in essence gain consciousness (become sentient). Management will strategize how they will tailor the change to level-set to their productivity norm, develop ways to accomplish their immediate tasks and make it relate to their success. A critical issue is to make sure that the technology design or process change has identified this employee/AI adaptive-reaction and has allowed it to happen in a predetermined way in order to keep the integrity and ROI and company culture.

The collaboration between people, AI, process, technology is challenging to our existing corporate culture because of the dynamic interplay at work. Employees and AI will adapt to changes in order to meet the demands and metrics of their immediate supervisor. This interconnected dynamic creates the moving target for analyzing qualitative data and will raise questions about traditional quantitative data as well.

Tapping Into Your Company’s Corporate Wisdom

The success of implementing AI/robotics is based on the ability to capture the knowledge of vulnerabilities and/or challenges that your employees already know. This knowledge is aware of where new technology implementations failed to produce the expected results and why. Tapping into your company’s corporate wisdom is needed because human factors and mutual benefit must be used to identify complexities and their consequences early in the change process.

AI will be able to accomplish the collection of corporate wisdom rapidly with advances in voice, ingestion of content from documents and video as well as the vast amounts of content found in meetings, emails, and other forms of communication. An example is Microsoft's ability to have Teams product notes on meetings including summary of points from each participant and general issues and accomplishments. There are many more examples of this, too many to discuss in this paper.

This use of scenarios based on experiential wisdom is helpful in uncovering where changes may be vulnerable or how it may break down, thus inviting employees and developers alike to incorporate a mutual benefit philosophy when establishing requirements for effective implementation and adaption. There is an AI and a robot that will run multiple scenarios (from experiential learning and best practices) when put in a situation with new or unknown data. These scenarios will incorporate 3D models to develop a strategic and tactical outcome. While this is in beta today, companies say they will have it ready for production in less than 3 years. This will first lead to the AI/robot housekeeper (think jetsons and lost in space only with better appendages and voice)

This inverts traditional thinking and puts the focus on how the employees work with AI and robots as a team member to achieve the goals of the corporation, instead of trying to stop the advance of the inevitable by trying to outdo the AI/robot at what it can do better.

Conclusion – the new corporate cultural evolution will include AI/robots as sentient, and they will move the corporate culture if we do not!

Expectations by both technical and non-technical employees regarding AI and robotics has raised the bar for speed of implementation and user-friendly interfaces (i.e. talking to Siri). There are many consequences of both the technology and process changes employees will be experiencing. If corporate cultures don’t begin to evolve to include AI and robots into its culture, they will look back in hindsight and regret not acting sooner.

Don’t let limited thinking and fear keep you from helping your company evolve its culture from one established decades ago to one that will embrace our future with AI and robots as part of the culture.