Seek Tools, Not Solutions: Why Any AI Strategy Must Take a Human-Centric Approach

Today’s issue was guest-authored by Product Engineering Leader & Managing Director of MBO Partners India Manikandan Parakkat .

Enterprises and top business leaders hurried to adopt AI (particularly generative AI) in any way they can, in many ways because of its purported ability to supercharge productivity and hasten innovation.

Some have billed AI as the solution to the skills gap and labor supply issues in today’s jobs market.

While AI can boost productivity and supercharge innovation, it can and should do so as a tool empowering human workers, not as a means to replace them. The human element in producing quality work and delivering excellent service simply cannot be dismissed, at least not yet.

Where AI models stand today, human input is still necessary to evaluate the usefulness and relevance of AI-generated output. If left unchecked, extensive reliance on AI could put enterprises at risk of security breaches, copyright issues, public controversies, and biases.

To illustrate how one of these risks could potentially jeopardize organizations, let’s take a look at what happened to Google a few weeks ago.

The tech giant was forced to pump the brakes on Gemini’s ability to generate images after users reported that it generated pictures that appeared biased against certain groups of people.

As companies increase their use of AI, the challenges of identifying and addressing bias have gained increasing attention. Because AI models are often a “black box,” understanding their biases can be difficult, and their impact on an organization’s processes can be substantial.

Take these fields for example:

●????? Hiring—When AI is used to shortlist applicants based on resume and job description matching, it’s possible for it to create inadvertent bias against a particular background, particularly if it is left to operate without human intervention. AI could unknowingly discriminate against candidates based on specific characteristics like the schools the candidate has attended or look for specific keywords that it has been trained on.

●????? Customer Service - People don’t like talking to robots. Replacing human customer support agents with AI chatbots is a shortcut to disappointing customers. That said there is a place for chat bots especially with generative AI and close to human dialoge being an possibility.There should always be an escape hatch for customers to reach an human as well. A better approach: Use AI to empower customer service employees with faster and better answers. Furthermore, as organizations cut costs and shift customer support to AI, the fact that some businesses still enable their customers to access human support will become an asset.

●????? Art and Creative Assets - AI can generate creative assets because it is trained on large datasets of existing work. In the rush to build powerful models, many AI companies were less than careful about copyright restrictions and appropriate artist recognition. Organizations use AI to generate creative assets from scratch risk opening themselves up to copyright infringement concerns.

As a technologist, there is no doubt that I believe in AI’s tremendous potential. However, these new technologies must be seen as tools to help workers produce work and achieve desired outcomes, not as solutions to achieve those outcomes on their own.

In the current state, AI technology is progressing, biases are being reduced while capabilities are expanding; as a result, an expanded model of collaboration between AI and humans is becoming more important. It fuses human creativity, moral reasoning, and responsibility with AI’s productivity to form a mutually beneficial alliance. This cooperative method is significant because many tasks still cannot be fully automated due to their subtle complexity.

Trending Topics:

●????? U.S. senator Bernie Sanders is pushing for a bill that would establish a 32-hour workweek in the U.S. without reduction in pay.

●????? According to the findings of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the fatal worker injury rate climbed to a 10-year high of 3.7 per 100,000 full-time workers.

●????? In PwC’s 27th Annual Global U.S. CEO Survey, 45% of executives expressed concerns about the viability of their businesses beyond the next 10 years. To stay competitive, they are prioritizing risk management, margins, transparency around generative AI, and new revenue streams.

●????? In a survey of 2,000 Gen Z workers, 41% of them said they were willing to stop working from home if it meant getting a raise.

●????? The “Big Stay”—the term used to describe lower employee turnover rates compared to two years ago—comes with its benefits such as higher productivity. However, if companies want to continue retaining top talent, they have to raise wages and reward high performers.