It’s a tale as old as time: Emerging technologies stoking panic and nostalgia. People thought television would destroy literature. A band once sang that video killed the radio star. Today, people fear that AI will take human jobs. A recent study found that worker’s distrust in AI is largely due to them viewing it as a job threat. That distrust isn’t unfounded for knowledge workers who cloister themselves from AI and its capabilities. The onus falls on leaders to ensure that their organizations integrate AI into the workplace to optimize employees’ work—not to replace employees.
The AI train has already left the station but it’s not too late to get on board. My company Jotform has been using AI in its processes for the past 4 years. Here’s how we continue to integrate the latest AI and automation tools to help our employees do their best work.
Encourage systems-thinking
You may have heard the term “systems thinking.” Author Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline offers a thorough explanation of the concept. It means viewing things in the world and our lives as systems, rather than isolated, linear cause-and-effect relationships. Take the human body: it’s not a collection of parts, but rather, it’s an assemblage of systems. Your skeletal system holds at least part of your body upright, your muscular system enables you to move your eyes and scroll down on your smartphone screen, your cardiovascular system delivers oxygen and nutrients to your tissues, etc.
One of my core principles of integrating AI into our workplace has been adopting a systems-thinking mindset. Instead of piecemeal training employees on AI tools, we encourage them to analyze their workflows—the interconnected steps that make up various tasks throughout their workday—and view them as systems. The goal is to use AI tools to automate as many steps of those workflows as possible. A recent McKinsey study found that companies are using AI in more parts of their business. Half of the respondent companies reported integrating AI into two or more business functions, the most common being marketing and sales, product and service, and IT functions. Every business has a multitude of AI and automation opportunities. Like the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, once you start looking for them, you’ll spot them everywhere.
This kind of thinking requires a secondary shift in mindset. Instead of viewing themselves as individual contributors, employees should see themselves as managers—of their systems and the AI and automation tools that make the wheels turn. As a manager, the first order of business is deciding on the goals of your system: what do you want to accomplish? What are your KPIs? For example, maybe you’re putting a system in place to send a newsletter to your subscribers once a week. Map out the steps, identify AI and automation opportunities, and build the system. Once your systems are in place, the managerial tasks are to measure your performance and continuously look for ways to improve the system. There are even tools you can implement that can automatically monitor whether all of the system parts are functioning properly. My personal favorite is called Dead Man’s Snitch.
By adopting a systems-thinking approach, employees can transform their roles and gain agency over their daily workloads.
View AI as your creative co-pilot
As employees begin to view their workflows as interconnected systems and integrate AI tools to enhance these processes, it’s crucial for them to shift their perspective on AI itself. AI isn’t just a tool—rather, it’s a collaborative partner. That partner not only boosts productivity, but it also facilitates innovation.
Wharton professor Christian Terwiesch challenged ChatGPT to come up with business ideas (products for the college student market) and compared the LLM’s output to ideas generated by students. The result? The average purchase probability of a ChatGPT product was 47%, compared with 40% for human ideas.
While this doesn’t mean that AI is more creative than humans—ChatGPT lacks the real-world context, among other things, and depends on humans to create the prompts—it does mean that it can be an incredibly efficient and low-cost collaborator for brainstorming ideas.
As Professor Terwiesch commented, “Worst case is you reject all of the ideas and run with your own. But our research speaks strongly to the fact that your idea pool will get better.”
Even if ChatGPT does generate winning ideas and solutions, humans are still tasked with selecting and refining them. Bottom line: there’s no reason not to use AI to enhance the idea generation process.
Carve out time to same time
A third core principle of integrating AI into your workplace to optimize performance is carving out time to save time. Adopting systems thinking, spotting automation opportunities, researching the available tools, and learning how to make AI a part of your creative process requires an upfront investment of time. It requires building some slack into the workday, which employees may be hesitant to do—who has the time? Leaders can highlight the benefits of making that time: you’ll earn it back in spades through all of the tasks you automate.
At Jotform, for example, we’ve always had to battle against phishing. People use our online forms for SPAM and fraudulent purposes. In the past, our support team dedicated significant efforts to catching these schemes manually. But over the past few years, we’ve developed an AI tool so that our support employees can redirect their energy to newer, more sophisticated issues. Developing the tools required a time investment. Our employees still monitor phishing manually. But AI dramatically lessened the load and freed them up to focus on more meaningful tasks.
That’s the beauty of AI tools and automation—not to replace people, but to empower them to offload tedious, manual tasks. For our employees, this has been motivation enough to convince them to adopt systems thinking and become managers of their own macrocosm of systems. Keep in mind: according to one study, 65 percent of organizations are regularly using generative AI. If you’re not using AI to boost your employees’ performance, your competitors will be—and I’d say that’s significantly more fearful than AI itself.
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