The conversation around AI is changing — and the emphasis on the augmentation of current workers, rather than the wholesale replacement of segments of the workforce, is a significant (and many would argue, necessary) shift. However, anxiety and fear are still tough contenders for those trying to usher in a new era of AI-assisted workplaces.
“It all comes down to what people want to change,” said Matas Sriubiskis, Growth Analyst at Zoom.ai, during the recent mesh conference meetup at Spaces in downtown Toronto.
Zoom.ai is a chat-based productivity tool that helps employees automate everyday tasks including searching for files, scheduling meetings, and generating documents. In an interview with DX Journal, Sriubiskis said public opposition to AI remains a major stumbling block not just for technology companies, but for businesses around the world.
As the language around AI changes, it becomes obvious that people want change from the technology, but remain hesitant about the disruptive effect AI-based automation could bring to their industries.
As highlighted in a recent Forbes article, knowledge-based workers with tenure, who have developed their skill-set over a period of time, are acting along the lines of basic psychology when it comes to fear surrounding automation. Unfortunately, that push-back can severely stunt the success of digital transformation projects designed to improve the lives of workers throughout the company, not replace them.
“A lot of people are afraid that AI’s going to take their job away,” said Sriubiskis. “That’s because that’s the narrative that we’ve seen for so long. It’s now about shifting the narrative to: AI’s going to make your job better and give you more time to focus more on the things that you’ve been hired to do because you’re good at doing them. There are tons of websites online talking about whether your job’s going to be taken away by AI, but they never really talk about how people’s jobs are going to be improved and what things they won’t have to do anymore so they can focus on the things that actually matter.”
Buy-in requires tangible results
This general AI anxiety can seem like a big obstacle to companies looking to adopt AI — but there are important steps companies can take to ensure their AI on-boarding is done with greater understanding and effectiveness.
As startups and businesses look to break through the AI fear-mongering, they have to demonstrate measurable benefits to employees, showing how AI can make work easier. By building an understanding of how AI affects employees, showing them how it benefits them, and using that information to inspire confidence in the project, businesses can work to create a higher level of employee buy-in.
One of the simplest examples of how to demonstrate this kind of benefit comes from Zoom.ai’s digital assistant for the workplace. An immediately beneficial way AI can augment knowledge-based workers is by giving them back their time.According to McKinsey & Company research cited by Zoom.ai, knowledge workers spend 19 percent of their time — one day a week — searching for and gathering information, sequestered by app or database silos. By showing how the employee experience can be improved with the use of automated meeting scheduling or document retrieval, you generate employee buy-in, said Sriubiskis.
“For us, the greatest advantage is giving employees some of their time back, so they can be more effective in the role that they were hired to do. So if there’s a knowledge-based worker, and they’re an engineer for example, they shouldn’t be spending time booking meetings, generating documents, finding information or submitting IT tickets. Their time would be better spent putting it towards their engineering work. For an enterprise company, based on our cases, we estimate that we can give employees at least 10 hours back a month. That allows them to be more productive, increase their collaboration and their creativity, and the overall employee experience improves.”
Full comprehension of a problem leads to better implementation
Another way to ensure a greater level of employee confidence is to understand the core problem that AI could be used to solve. You can’t just throw AI at an issue, said Sriubiskis. The application of the AI solution has to make sense in the context of an identified problem.
“When a lot of companies talk about their current endeavours, they’re saying, ‘we’re exploring AI to do this.’ But they’re not actually understanding a core problem that their employees are facing. If you just try to throw a new technology at a problem you don’t fully understand, you’re not going to be as successful as you want. You might be disappointed in that solution, and people are going to be frustrated that they wasted time without seeing any results.”
This deliberate effort to understand a key problem before implementing a solution can drive to better outcomes. That’s why Zoom.ai has incorporated this kind of core observation into its process of on-boarding clients or approaching a new project.
“Before we do a proof-of-concept or a pilot now,” said Sriubiskis, “we require companies to do an interview with some of our product and our UI/UX team. That way, we can understand how they do things currently, but also so we can provide a quantitative metric. Qualitative is nice, but people also want to see the results, and make sure their work was worth it. We make sure to interview a whole bunch of users, clearly understand the problem, and make sure what we’re doing isn’t a barrier to what they’re actually trying to solve, it’s going to help it and help it more over time.”
These approaches are all about making the team of employees feel like an AI solution is working for them, leading to greater effectiveness of AI implementation to augment the workforce. It remains key, said Sriubiskis, to make sure employees can see the tangible benefits of the technology. Zoom.ai makes that employee experience a core part of their on-boarding process: “We report back to our users and tell them how many hours they’ve saved. So they see how the actual improvements are seen by them, not just by management or the company as a whole.”
The future is filled with AI. It’s just a question of making sure it helps, not hurts, human capital — and that a positive transition to AI tools prioritizes the employee experience along the way.
