The advent of AI represents a real challenge for businesses, which are well aware that they are facing a wave that will change many things, but don’t really know how to tackle the problem, starting with HR, which is faced with the question of how jobs will evolve and how work will be transformed.
Indeed, the integration of artificial intelligence into business is not just about automating tasks or replacing jobs. On the contrary, it will require an in-depth rethinking of work itself.
Yet too many businesses approach AI as a technological patch, without questioning the way work is conceived.
Here are a few ideas for a runway to the future, even if, as we all know, it’s easier to read the future and analyze it…once it’s passed.
Go beyond jobs and think in terms of activities
Historically, businesses have designed jobs around skills and responsibilities that remain fixed in time. This approach, whose limitations have long been apparent in certain skills repositories, is becoming obsolete as AI reorganizes the production of value.
The best way to really understand what impact AI will have on our businesses is not to rethink work in an off-the-ground way, disconnected from the rest, but to start from the business and, above all, from the customer, by asking ourselves some simple questions.
- What are the key results expected?
- How are these results produced today?(The work of the future will be designed around the “job to be done”)
- What AI/human combination would optimize their achievement?
This approach, which some call “productivity-based job design” (The Rise of the Superworker: Delivering On The Promise Of AI), involves breaking down the tasks and jobs needed to achieve the expected results into simple activities, analyzing the contributions of AI, and then reassigning missions according to the comparative strengths of humans and intelligent systems.
All the more reason to adopt the concepts of product design when it comes toReimagining Work as a Product.
Determining the place of the human in the AI era
A common mistake is to see AI as a simple assistance tool, or as a pure and simple substitute for the human being. The reality is much more nuanced:
First of all, AI excels primarily at performing predictable, massive and standardized tasks, often better and faster than a human. In fact, it’s clear that gains drop off when it comes to more complex processes (Generative AI in the workplace: revolution or illusion?).
The human, on the other hand, retains an advantage when it comes to managing the unexpected, complex decision-making and rich social interaction (Employees must follow the processes. Are you sure?, People Centric Operations: adapting work and operations to knowledge workers and Socialize your business ? What does it mean ?)
All this means that the role of people in organizations will evolve. It’s no longer a question of executing, but of supervising, arbitrating and optimizing the work of AI.
It’s also important to bear in mind that this is the end of static job frameworks: we’ll be thinking more in terms of aggregating activities that will evolve with the technology.
This repositioning calls for new skills: critical analysis, understanding of AI systems and the posture of “AI manager”.
New models for measuring success
AI will also change the way we measure performance. All too often, productivity remains locked into obsolete indicators (time spent on a task, volume processed or produced). But these indicators are no longer appropriate when an AI can do in a second what it would take a human a day to do.
We therefore need to redefine performance in terms of the impact and value created for the customer (Productivity: what if quality was the new quantity?).
Here again, we need answers to simple questions.
- Does AI improve the quality of the final service or product?
- Does it reduce irritants for employees and customers?
- Does it enable human talent to be reallocated to higher value-added missions?
This calls for new individual and collective performance evaluation systems, moving away from measuring execution alone, to focus on business impact (How do you measure employee performance without becoming a Care Bear?).
Bottom line
AI is not an opportunity to reinvent work, it’s an obligation, whether we like it or not. It will do so with simple principles, but they will raise complicated questions for those who have always preferred to sweep the dust under the carpet and favor the status quo, either because they don’t understand what’s going on, or because they prefer to pretend they don’t (Why do leaders and experts make big mistakes when it comes to anticipating the future?).
Start from business and customer needs, not technologies, as we’ve always done.
Deconstruct jobs into activities, then identify those that need to be automated or transformed.
Redefine the role of people in this new organization of work.
Evolve performance indicators to reflect true value creation.
Doing nothing or going about things in an unmethodical way can lead to a totally unproductive implementation of AI. Because poorly applied AI does not replace a well-designed organization, it simply amplifies existing dysfunctions.
Image: employee replaced by AI from Stock-Asso via Shutterstock.
