How will AI impact internal communications?
I was delighted to speak to 60 communications professionals this morning about AI and its impact on internal communications at the Institute of Internal Communications Voice Live '19 conference. Below is a slightly edited version of my talk.
My day job is all about working with leaders to use AI to create more competitive companies. We help answer questions about how AI can drive revenues, improve customer service, better engage employees, drive deeper insights and improve productivity. What I have observed is one of the biggest challenges holding AI back from fulfilling its potential is its narrative and the reluctance of employees to embrace AI.
This is why you, as internal communication professionals, have such as an important role to bring a more balanced, reassuring and engaging message about AI to your organisations.
The media narrative paints a utopian and dystopian picture of AI. On the one hand publications such as the BBC, Time and Forbes magazine headline AI stories with “the end of humanity”, “the AI apocalypse", the lack of company AI “ethics frameworks," and as my colleague says, images of "shiny silver robots" who will take our jobs.
On the other-hand headlines claim AI will usher in a new era of prosperity and productivity, reduce climate change, improve health care, raise educational standards, make our overcrowded cities and roads more manageable and safe.
So what should we believe? Unfortunately fear tends to win out and that means we have to present more of a complete major to our colleagues.
Technology change is the new normal
Much of your job is about engaging employees. You are helping them to feel heard, valued and to understand their daily activities within a wider of purpose. But that is harder to do in an era in which technology is driving a sense of instability, insecurity as the old social contract of a job for many years and an ever advancing career within a company dissipates.
We are living in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution or Industry 4.0. The speed of change is unprecedented with the ten largest companies in the world now tech companies. And many of these companies are still relatively young. The smart phone is only 12 years old used but over three billion of the seven billion people on this planet use them. There are revolutions in precision medicine, 3D printing, autonomous vehicles, nano technologies, and block chain to come.
And AI is a key enabler of these technologies. And AI is therefore a key enabler of this pace of change. Change is the new normal and that needs to be communicated.
The impact of AI and future of work - short term turbulence, longer term good
In 2013 Oxford University academics published a paper on “the future of employment.” The media erroneously reported that 47% of US jobs are at risk from computerisation. It is not unfair to say that this report has traumatised the world. It conflated job elimination with certain tasks of a job being impacted by computers.
But automation has been a constant in the workforce. In the 1800s over 85% of US jobs were in agriculture versus 1% today. The first industrial revolution was focused on manufacturing driven by the newly invented steam engines and the second revolution brought electricity and telephones in the late 1900s. During these shifts generally there has been a period of instability in employment as workers are forced to retrain but typically find lower paid jobs in the shorter-term. This disruption can last a generation but in the longer term it is broadly a net job creator.
So what should you be communicating internally about AI?
So what should you be communicating internally about AI?
The first requirement is bring balance to the discussion. The Guardian, for example, reported that in 2021 6% of all US jobs will be replaced by robots. Rubbish. It is going to take a lot longer.
Second what about AI improving our jobs? AI can be something that can make our jobs more interesting. It can help a lot of repetition and mundane tasks such as:
- Answering the same questions in customer service or HR
- Data entry across disparate systems
- Boring checks and cross referencing of accounting data or invoices
- Testing and writing code
AI needs to be taken seriously by employees as it will come to the workplace. Your employees can stay ahead by helping to embrace these technologies. Getting educated on how they can be used. Seeing how AI and humans fit into the workflow processes. And generally being seen as champions of AI.
The workforce needs to be educated on the responsible use of AI
But there is another important communication need. Technology can always be used well and also poorly. And the same is true of AI. AI will be woven into the fabric of an organisation from HR to customer service to sales to operations. There is a need to educate employees on what it means to use AI responsibly, including:
- Limiting AI bias – that its use is inclusive, diverse and fair
- Ensuring accountability – person(s) are responsible and accountable for the use of AI
- Legal – that it is being used legally and ethically
And critically in an era where customer service is increasingly a company differentiator AI needs to be used responsibly and effectively with customers.
We also need to make sure that AI does not risk reputational damage to our company. You might have seen just last week:
- Apple credit card offered men 10x the credit limit of women - likely an AI / Machine Learning bias
- Amazon stopped their automated AI recruiting system as it reflected their historic manual biases of hiring a lot of white, 20 something technologists.
Trust in AI and data is key
And all of this speaks to the need for trust in AI – this is your biggest opportunity as internal comms. How do you help create an environment where AI is trusted from your employees, your customers, your partners and your vendors? Without this trust AI will not work.
This means forcing an open dialogue about AI in your organisation. Management needs to be seen to engage in an open and authentic manner.
So how will AI technology impact your role?
AI will impact a lot of the tools and process that you will use. You have already seen this with communication platforms such as Slack. Conversations, communications, content creation and insights will be increasingly automated.
One of the best examples of communications related technology I like is from a UK company called Blink. They are blurring the lines of internal comm apps and other apps. They rolled out to 20,000 British Stagecoach’s bus and rail employees a mobile app to find out company news, communicate with colleagues, provide feedback and access training and policies. This saw much increased engagement and reached many employees that didn't have traditional emails and might have felt disenfranchised from the wider organisation.
Many future internal communications will be automated. But this will still help drive engagement as it will help ensure the right messages are delivered to the right people at the right time.
All rise the AI superpower - the power of omnipresence
Imagine that you had a superpower to see and analyse every message between all employees, customers, vendors and stakeholders in real-time across an organisation. Imagine if you could magically gauge the sentiment of employees today, yesterday and tomorrow; their reactions to the latest executive management missive; their engagement levels and their real worries about the company. Imagine if you could work out who is talking about what topics and connect them to other people in your organisation in distance geographies that might be relevant. Imagine if you could see bottlenecks and problems in your organisation before others.
This technology is starting to be available today. AI conversational and message analytics can analyse unstructured calls, messages, emails and determine what is going on in an organisation. There will be many questions about data privacy and the fear of big brother, but this technology has a chance not only to redefine internal communications but fundamentally redefine how a company is managed and run.
AI brings an exciting future to you as internal communication professionals. And I hope you join me in spreading the message that well managed, trustworthy and responsible AI should be something that we should all lean into.
I look forward to your questions.
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Further notes. Some of the most interesting questions and discussions came afterwards. What jobs will be impacted? How do we get management to engage in an open discussion on AI? How do we build trust about AI? When all is changing much still stays the same - the importance of the human touch, relationships and human creativity.
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About Simon Greenman
Simon Greenman is a partner at Best Practice AI — an AI Management Consultancy that helps companies create competitive advantage with AI. Simon is on the World Economic Forum’s Global AI Council; an AI Expert in Residence at Seedcamp; and Co-Chairs the Harvard Business School Alumni Angels of London. He has twenty years of leadership of digital transformations across Europe and the US. He holds a degree in Computing & AI. Please get in touch by emailing him directly or find him on LinkedIn or Twitter or follow him on Medium.