Recently I have been following with great interest the amazing work inside #NSW Education to utilise AI to help teachers remove their admin burden so they can teach more. Better said by the NSW Deputy Premier and Education Minister Prue Car:

“NSWEduChat does not replace the valuable work of our teachers – it
helps them to save time, tailor their resources, and focus on their critical
work in the classroom.”

This example led me to reflect on how designing and experimenting with AI in organisations may be beginning to play out. Feels like we are still in the stage of “it’s a cute and exciting new puppy to play with, that will grow up to be our best friend”.

Trailing and experimenting with AI is critical, yet as I zoom out to see a broader context over a longer time horizon, I find myself asking this question:

Let’s assume our AI experiments work – are our people ready for that success?

Are organisations not addressing this? Or maybe they are and it isn’t newsworthy? Sure, some may say that it doesn’t make for a high clickbait headline to say: ‘hey, look at our great AI initiative that increases our productivity and by the way, we are exploring and investing in our people’s future capabilities today so we can make more progress on our priorities together” …

The private sector continues to drive forward at pace. We are now seeing proud public announcements being made of up to 50% reduction in staff whilst bragging that revenue per head has risen to 74% in the same year. It’s not a conversation to be put off or shoved into the ‘for the next generation to worry about’ basket. So my hope is …

If you are tackling the implications of AI as an integrated part of your AI initiatives – thank goodness, shout about it, share with us how you are doing it. We want to know that our organisations care about the social impact of their quest for improved productivity. The solution is bigger than you.

If you are not tackling it – then you are accepting the risk today that there will be losses tomorrow, and furthermore that you don’t see it as your problem…but it is. The old rhetoric of ‘we are supporting them with redundancies and transition support services’ is a tired narrative and frankly it will be way too little, too late, and the economic and mental health damage will already be done.

Where do we place our precious human resources when AI does it better? – You can’t leave that to chance, or assume that others, smarter than you, are working on it. All organisations and institutions need to be actively engaged with and working on future workforce capabilities now – as an integrated component of any change initiatives and it needs to be a core part of your Social Responsibility as an employer.

In Australia, there are 2.5 million people employed in the public sector, imagine what is possible if we were able to positively and safely harness the power of AI with a full workforce that is always future ready and equipped with the capabilities to continuously provide quality services that meet the evolving needs of the communities.

Practically speaking, active support for resolving tomorrow’s problem needs to start at the same time you start to experiment or think about any change in your organisation. If every organisation, either private or public, took this approach, we might get some breakthrough thinking that gets us beyond the knee-jerk reaction of job cutting, sending people to the cliff edge of “redundancies and transition support”.

Supporting to solve this longer-term impact IS the most important thing for sustainable and
successful outcomes.

Things to consider:

• Don’t draw too tight a boundary around the scope of our AI-driven initiatives, it’s not an IT thing (just like culture isn’t an HR thing!) – include human impact, and include the likely impacted communities to drive and find solutions to the “what if” questions as you trial and develop the technology.
• Call out the risks early and often, seeking to mitigate and manage them with the future in mind, as work and futures unfold.
• Stay connected to the bigger ecosystem at play outside of your own organisation. Revisit your ESG policies (if you have them!) and monitor their effectiveness regularly, reprioritising as you go.

In the words of Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline – Today’s problems come from yesterday’s solutions. So, if you are involved in building an AI solution today – look around you – do you have human impact within your scope? Do you have the most likely impacted community voice with you, do you have your HR team with you?

Or is it a room full of tech enthusiasts (and equity investors) determining the future of what work will or won’t be done by humans inside your organisation.

Give us a balanced narrative to energise for now and create positive futures.

Is your organisation doing this well? I’d love to hear more and help share your story, and if you not there yet, let me help you to get this conversation started in your organisation, safely and thoughtfully.