What is Work All About? The Changing Shape of Work with GenAI
Generative AI continues to send shockwaves through the business world. As David Cahn astutely observes, we may be approaching a tipping point in the AI bubble - and how organizations respond will be telling. Some fear widespread job losses but the reality more likely, will be nuanced. AI presents great opportunities to augment and enhance human work, especially as we’re challenged by a shrinking workforce. It also poses challenges that will require thoughtful management about how to redesign work in a way that utilizes skills, drives productivity, and most importantly, creates jobs that employees want to do!
HR practitioners - are you ready?
Work is About Productivity and Creativity
Recent research paints an exciting picture of AI's potential to significantly boost worker productivity. A study by Peng et al. on GitHub's Copilot tool found that developers using AI assistance completed coding tasks 55.8% faster on average. Similarly, an experiment by Noy and Zhang with professionals performing writing tasks showed a 40% reduction in time taken when using ChatGPT. These aren't just marginal gains - we're talking about potentially transformative improvements in how quickly work gets done. This is creating “capacity” for organizations. Do they ask their workers to do more during their workday? Allow workers to use that time to be creative?
But it's not just about speed. AI can augment human creativity in powerful ways. Studies show AI tools can help less creative individuals produce more original work. However, there's an interesting caveat - while AI boosts individual creativity, it may lower group originality by making outputs more homogeneous. This presents an intriguing challenge for managers and HR professionals, especially in light of recent pushback against DEI initiatives and other employee-centric programs. As some organizations pivot HR back towards more traditional risk-management and cost-control priorities, there's a risk of overlooking the strategic importance of workforce development and deployment in the AI era.
How does HR use AI's creative potential to promote diverse perspectives that drive innovation, while also balancing the needs of employees with the needs of the business? Finding a more reliable and sustainable input into the labor part of the business model is the dream of executives by making the labor input into the business model less unpredictable and more sustainable. The biggest complaint of managers is the vagaries of labor, and the difficulty of finding (and keeping) talent. If this issue were eliminated by replacing employees with predictable AI, how much easier it would be to manage the organization! But, we can’t replace all humans with technology, so we need to find a way to balance these competing priorities - leveraging AI to stabilize the workforce and tapping into what humans do best – innovate, make decisions, interact effectively with other humans.
Work is About The Workflow
One of the things that AI excels at is quickly processing and synthesizing large amounts of information - tasks that previously required significant human effort. This shift is analogous to how GPS and ride-sharing apps eliminated the need for taxi drivers to memorize complex city maps, making drivers more efficient in reaching their destinations, with fewer errors, ultimately making them more productive and profitable – completing more error-free fares each day. This example illustrates how technology is used to not replace human expertise, but rather to free up cognitive bandwidth for higher-level tasks. Some of the opportunities for workplace AI and workflow improvement will fall into two categories:
Workflow augmentation: Helping employees work faster, do more, and operate more independently. Imagine an AI assistant that can quickly draft emails, synthesize lengthy reports, create summaries of meetings, or generate initial designs based on a brief.
Workflow automation: Handling cognitive processes and somewhat repetitive tasks, especially those involving unstructured data and information retrieval. Think of AI systems that can automatically categorize and route customer inquiries or analyze large datasets to identify trends. We have all interacted with chat bots that provide answers to routine questions, a very efficient way to get information, at any time of the day or night, without having to interact with a human.
Generative AI is increasingly viewed as a general purpose technology (GPT) - one with the potential to transform nearly every sector of the economy, much like the wide-spread use of electricity in our cities in the early 1900’s or the globalization of the internet in the 1980s. These disruptive events required rethinking of how work is done. Factory productivity was improved when they could run 24/7 due to the benefits of electricity. The internet facilitated connecting with people, selling products, getting information, etc., making it unnecessary to leave our homes or offices to get things done. In a similar way, AI will drive the need to reimagine workflows to best leverage its capabilities. This is at the core a management and organizational design issue, not just a technical one.
HR leaders - this might be THE opportunity to step into a truly strategic role! By spearheading the integration of AI into workplace strategies, HR can be at the forefront of this wave of transformation, since, ultimately, AI makes people more productive. This may well be the most strategically critical work HR can undertake in the coming years, directly impacting organizational effectiveness, competitiveness, and long-term success.
Work is About The New Essential Skills: Using AI Tools
Just as digital literacy became important in past decades, the ability to effectively use AI tools is becoming a fundamental workplace skill. This goes beyond just knowing how to operate the technology - it requires understanding how to craft effective prompts, interpret AI outputs, and integrate AI capabilities into existing workflows. As AI handles more routine cognitive tasks, human skills like conceptual thinking, judgment, and understanding value become much more important. The ability to learn continuously through cycles of action, experience, reflection, and conceptualization will be key. While most occupations won't disappear entirely, nearly all will change.
HR practitioners - how do we ensure our workforce is equipped to work effectively with AI tools? How can we foster these skills across our workforce? How do we create a culture that embraces continuous learning and adaptation? What new competencies should we be looking for in hiring? What management skills are necessary to orchestrate work across human and digital workers? What leadership skills will emerge as critical in AI-augmented decision making? What are our expectations about employee productivity and impact?
Work is About Solving Hard Problems
Despite the immense potential, integrating AI into workplaces isn't without challenges and fascinating use cases and developments:
"Emotional prompts" that help elicit more nuanced AI responses
Advanced AI agents like Cognition Labs' "Devin" that can autonomously handle complex coding tasks
Experiments with AI in leadership roles, like NetDragon's "bot CEO"
Ethical considerations around treating AI as equivalent to human employees, as seen in Lattice's retracted plans to include AI in HR systems.
How do we maintain the human element in our processes while leveraging AI capabilities? How do we ensure we keep “humans in the loop” to use what differentiates us from machines – judgment and creativity?
The need to preserve and proliferate institutional knowledge as AI takes on more information management roles. This is a critical consideration for HR - how do we ensure valuable human expertise isn't lost in the transition?
Work is about Looking Ahead
To help the workers, managers, and executives , HR professionals must build a new toolkit to navigate unknown waters - sensing, sense-making, and sense-giving.
Sensing. Principal researchers in this area include David Snowden, Ellen Langer among others. This encompasses the detection and recognition of important information from the environment. As it applies to AI technologies, HR leaders need to anticipate how developments such as proactive AI systems that offer unprompted suggestions, advanced multimodal interfaces that go beyond text, and "mixtures of experts" approaches that combine specialized models, innovative solutions like AI-powered apprenticeships could completely change how organizations sense, understand, and act in complex environments.
Sense-making. Principal researchers in this area include David Weick, Gary Klein, Henry Mintzberg, among others. Sense-making is the process of interpreting and understanding information to construct meaning. As it relates to AI, HR professionals will have to assess the workforce's AI readiness and design appropriate training programs to bridge skill gaps. Job roles will have to be reimagined and it is expected that entirely new positions will emerge. McKinsey identified that when data analytics became mainstream for most organizations, two types of positions were created – data scientists and data translators. These jobs were new to organizations. HR professionals must also grapple with developing ethical frameworks for AI use, adapting performance management systems and total rewards regimes for AI-augmented roles.
Finally, sense-giving. Principal researchers in this area include Mary Jo Hatch, Cynthia Hardy, Tim Berners-Lee among others. Sense-giving involves the communication of information to influence how others perceive and understand their environment. HR will have to think about how to guide the organization through the AI transition, drive the change initiatives for AI adoption and evolve recruitment and development strategies to prioritize AI-relevant skills. They must shape how AI is perceived and valued and employee concerns about AI in the workplace. HR will be the opinion-leaders, encouraging a safe and positive culture of human-AI collaboration.
Success will come to organizations that integrate AI to augment human capabilities, rather than simply replace workers. For HR practitioners, this presents both a significant challenge and an incredible opportunity to drive strategic value. The ability to effectively sense, make sense of, and give sense to an AI-powered workplace will be what separates forward-thinking HR departments from the rest. And who wants to be all work and no fun?
Let’s get to work, keep humans in the loop, and get our organizations in AI-shape!