The Evolution of Digital Colleagues: From Passive to Active

We have recently become accustomed to leveraging Co-pilot/GenAI as a passive digital colleague that takes part silently in our meetings, generates minutes, captures action items and even tracks follow-ups. A little more than a year ago, this would have been unimaginable, but things are about to change dramatically.

OpenAI has recently announced the availability of Realtime API which makes it easier to build fast, low-latency multimodal experiences focused on speech-to-speech communication. We are potentially witnessing digital colleagues rapidly transitioning from being passive to active engaging in meetings just as we "humans do". Future human-machine interactions will feel far more fluid as our digital colleagues will be adept at handling interruptions including those involving complex and multi-threaded conversations involving both voice/video and in real-time.

However, as with any technological leap, we need to avoid falling into the trap?of techno-optimism and recognise some of the challenges ahead:

• Will adoption lead to higher chances of job displacement?
• Will there be unintended consequences such as increased surveillance for workplace productivity monitoring?? We all know it is a fine line between productivity tracking and invasive surveillance and that line is becoming increasingly blurry.
• Can human-machine interactions lead to a misinterpretation of employee behaviour???AI still struggles with context, nuances, cultural differences & norms, humour and of course bias. How long before your digital colleague reports you to HR because you said something it did not like??

Arguably, we are moving at a speed that is dictated by intense competition where market dominance and profitability seem to matter most.?The alternative is gradual adoption where tech innovators, businesses, policymakers, and workers are more engaged in understanding the implications including the broader social impact. Otherwise, we (the workers) are simply passive actors unwillingly taking part in one big experiment where the ultimate destination is not yet clear, and no one will be accountable (social media is a case in point).?

Most of us perhaps would welcome new digital colleagues but it is imperative to do so in a way that does not diminish the human experience and the quality of interactions we have with each other. Just imagine a world where, overtime, we come to trust our Digital colleagues more than our fellow Human beings!