Why the future of work is still human

Artificial Intelligence is currently all the rage.? Politicians pontificate about the risks of AI, while unabashed chip-makers accrue unimaginable wealth.? Social media is in a frenzy, regulators wring their hands, and fresh from hearing some consultant’s apocalyptic predictions, CEOs try to rewrite their company’s strategy via some amateurish attempts at ‘prompts’ on ChatGPT or Copilot.? But as the football pundit question goes, is “AI all that?” Is it the GOAT technology that will reshape the global landscape, or it is just this year’s over-hyped non-fungible token (NFT)?

I tried this month to get with the zeitgeist and joined an online thought-leadership conference called TDB.? I got very excited being asked to share a platform and learn from so many smart tech people.? So, I bought myself a hoodie, hired a green screen, and readily gushed to camera about the importance of building cohesion in a hybrid world.? I was seen and heard, but I have no idea if what I said resonated with anyone.? It’s harder to sense that “over the web”, hosted in the cloud in the pseudo-reality of virtual presenting.? I gave a similar talk a few days later, in-person, to over 600 HR leaders, at OSHRM, an AI themed event in Muscat, Oman. There the feedback was instantaneous, or rather, the host at least thanked me for “keeping to time.”?

The new world of work

It seems that the world of work is becoming less human and, irrespective of intelligence, more artificial.? Since the end of the 2020/21 social distancing and travel restrictions, much of the world has reverted to a pre-pandemic pattern, with sport, music, theatre, hospitality and even business-education readopting the “old normal”, prioritising in-person events, classrooms and personal proximity.?

The world of work emerged from the lockdowns radically changed.? People seized freedom from the commute and fled their offices, as some well-meaning employers proclaimed “you can work from home forever”, unleashing the greatest liberalisation of work for 100 years.? As I write, the new and seemingly settled world of work, is a smorgasbord of hybrid, flexible and remote working and our organisations are now a blended array of employees, consultants, gig workers and contractors. Working out who works for whom, when, where and why, has become an exhausting 4D organisational chess game.?

But despite the rapid adoption of hybrid-working, putatively offering the “best of both worlds”, no one seems to be very happy.? If you look at the evidence; various studies since 2020 show that employee engagement has fallen, productivity has seen no dividend from these new found freedoms, and retaining talent is more difficult than ever.?

Several academics, citing studies in the US, and the public-relations of start-ups promoting “Hybrid Working Advisory” services [yes, it is a thing] have tried to present evidence that employees, businesses, their shareholders and society at large are all beneficiaries of this new paradigm.? I remain on the sidelines, bemused by reports of hollowed out ‘donut cities’, a mental health crisis amongst the young, and feel a growing unease at an epidemic of loneliness emerging.? Intriguingly, there is evidence that points the other way - to the value of connection and co-location. A study by Steve Blank at Stanford found that startups that have employees together in offices (rather than remote) "grow 3.5 time faster".? I think the debate on the assumed value of ‘WFH’ and hybrid has got some way to run, and the evidence, over time, will prove the value of close human proximity, not distance.

Terrible offices

To their credit, many leaders have thrown the ‘kitchen sink’ at the employee disengagement problem; launching check-in days, virtual water-cooler moments, return to office mandates, implicit performance management steers, upgrading online-monitoring and surveillance, and hosting interminable town hall after town hall to keep their people connected. Offices may be more densely populated on midweek ‘contact’ days, but the bland rows of anonymous standardised desks prop-up headset-wearing staff connected to their colleagues outside the office, working elsewhere.

Too many modern offices have become unattractive and dull, without character or any sense of ownership.? As The Spectator’s Rory Sutherland put it: "Consider the open-plan office. I am the vice chairman of a large ad agency. In the 1970s, I would have had an office worthy of Mussolini, with a walk-in humidor and my own personal mixologist. Now I walk into the office and am given a power socket and a chair, and not even the same chair I had the previous day.”? CEO's may wish to see more staff in the office, more collaboration and in-person 'hustle', but now the hybrid ‘genie’ has been released, I guess that for many, remote will forever seem a much better prospect.? The settled attendance patterns and economics all suggest hybrid working means less square footage needed, and premises cost savings can be realised. Perhaps CEO’s could invest some of these savings in making the retained open-plan spaces a bit less terrible?

?Perhaps AI will save the day? ?

So amidst falling engagement, flatlining productivity and poor talent retention, what can be done?? At the recent conference, many of talks were about how AI will replace our tedious jobs and meaningless tasks.? We will be free to fly off on long weekends while the machine does the heavy-lifting, the admin, the spreadsheets and resolve the annual budget arguments.? Jamie Dimon was quoted as saying that in the future we will not need to work any more than 3 days a week because AI.

AI can already make recruitment processes faster, cheaper and less time-consuming for managers and overburdened HR officers.?Several companies offer services that scan your candidate’s face, listen to their words and assess their posture and demeanour and then create a scored transcript from the interview and help you to decide to hire or not.?

A story about Aimee

The flaw in this AI-enabled approach may have already have been discovered.? In February this year, a marketing firm in Manchester called Bottled Imagination (great name by the way) went though an online recruitment process and hired someone called "Aimee", who was great at some tasks but poor at anything requiring creativity and originality, which matters much in a firm called Bottled Imagination.? Aimee was able to translate blog posts and social media copy at the speed of light, however only had a memory that worked up until 2021, which held her back somewhat. Sadly, Aimee failed her probation and was let go.

You are probably already ahead of me on this.? Aimee is not a real person.? Aimee is not even called Aimee.? Aimee was an AI who applied for a job, and got the job through an online process and was hired by a firm who had never actually met Aimee in-person. The picture released in the press at the time is not actually Aimee, but is an AI's impression of what Aimee may well have looked like, if she was a real person in the real world, which of course she never was.

Artificial intelligence in the world of work is already visible to us in plain sight.? For example, the UK was once known as a “nation of shopkeepers” but in the past decade investment in new technology has enabled stores to lay off thousands of staff and replace them with automated checkout machines.? My worry is not about a human being replaced by a machine (the industrialised world has hundreds of years of experience of doing exactly that) but we have now institutionalised a whole new category of job that is designed to just serve machines.? We employ people to keep the check-out machine “happy”, not the customer; to respond and key in the code, verify the ID, investigate the unexpected item, etc.?

AI may prove to be a huge productivity game changer, but the evidence of the recent past is that it won’t.? Consider some of the technological goodies we have been given in the last decade, including blockchain, cryptocurrency, the cloud, 5G, Zoom and Teams, Starlink, the metaverse, augmented reality and more.? These are wondrous tools but the reality is, if you look at the evidence for the uplift in productivity attributable to technology and innovation (something called “total factor productivity”) then there has been little or no increase in the past 15 years.? Perhaps we need to think about AI a little more prosaically.? Some have already taken that stance, including John Long, SVP Creative at Digitas, who shared his own scepticism succinctly on X.?

“Switching from pens to typewriters didn't make the work better.?

Switching from typewriters to laptops didn't make the work better.?

Switching from film to digital didn't make the work better.?

AI is a fantastic tool, but...it won't make the work better.”

?Even as a “tool” AI may end up being overwhelming for many and, eventually, underwhelming for us all.? The future of work may involve more technology; but in a hybrid world, firms need internal cohesion more than ever.? I have written elsewhere, and at length, about the importance of building “social capital” to provide that much needed glue.? It requires leaders to invest time in building the quality, depth and variety of relationships and collaborative behaviours within the firm.? This means doubling down on being human again.? Leaders obviously need to understand AI and the importance it might play, but if you make being human at the heart of your business, you have a much better chance than any new technology of making work better.

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John Dore

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