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Forget AI in the computer industry (where indeed the discourse is complex as its appearance shakes the very foundation of software crafting, engineering, product and design alike), what about it everywhere else? How does it affect every other employee in every other industry and what’s first emergency for you as a leader of an “AI or DIE” company?
Let’s first look around for context. Much is happening in the world. Most of it dreadful. Little to be pleased for or feel proud about. No matter what side of the political spectrum you happen to be on, you’d have to be blind not to see how it all feels like it’s crumbling faster than we can build anything.
I have been writing about the tech and business world, for what is now gosh, nearly 20 years. I’ve been lucky that they have been pivotal years in human and technology development. When I started my career the internet was barely there, everything else came after. The revolution that iPhones brought about, cloud computing, SaaS, digital money, living our lives through apps, everything we see whizzing by on the infernal informational highway came at us at once in the space of only a few (tens of) years.
That makes us all sorely unprepared. It’s a lot. It’s incredibly much. Much more than our brains and our bodies were built for. And they are breaking on us.
The world is in the midst of a physical and mental health crisis of unprecedented size and it’s rare to find anyone who thinks they’re doing peachy. And all this is before we recount that it is hardly just the digital explosion that we grapple with but ecological disasters, pandemics and wars thrown in for universal good measure as if to test our final limits. It’s no wonder we are faced with a world more divided and less compassionate than ever. Some even suggest we may collectively have developed “zoochosis”, a condition wild animals develop in captivity characterised by uncommon behaviours and distress. After all, we do indeed all live in cages of our own making and no one touches any grass anymore. (Millennium pun intended).
And then again, and above all this, we all have myriads of small and big life crises to navigate that make being open and kind at work, a truly trite consideration.
The State of Humanity in the Workplace
Whatever it is that has colluded to made humans more cruel and less connected than ever to each other, it’s here and it’s everywhere including in the workplace. HR and organisational efforts everywhere are as we know, largely useless if not even utterly impotent (if they weren’t they would have protected the diversity and equity work that is being thrown out the windows this year) so who is there to observe this worsening and change things? And mind you, change them not because it’s the nice and moral thing to do, but because presiding over a cruel, closed off and disconnected employee body is bad (and very costly!) business.
Truth be told, most of us are never in the office anymore and much of these interactions are yes harder to observe in particular with how we never learned to manage people remotely after all but there’s gaslighting, gossiping, isolation, mockery and worse in calls, email and zooms everywhere. There’s aggressive behaviour and there’s even systemic bullying we hardly ever point out and punish. Not only that, but even more insidiously worryingly, there is a bevvy of daily small passive aggressive gestures towards each other within our own organisation when we aren’t happy at work and whilst we ignored disengagement for 20 years now it will bite us swiftly.
This may be different inside the team so you may not feel it at all at the bubble level. We’re all part of at least one team and any decent team will hopefully feel like a refuge and a point of proof that the world still stands and humans are open. Outside of the team though, whenever there’s interaction with other parts of the organisation there are loads of micro aggressions. The famous “throwing the monkey” concept of the 2000’s where corporate workers had become incredibly skilled at throwing the task back over the fence to another co-worker so that it becomes their to-do instead, is one such passive aggressive example but there are many. No one was doing it because they wanted to hurt another colleague but because they are tired, resentful and fed up and would do anything at times to get out of an assignment.
Kindness, compassion, empathy, humour, intuition, creating fearlessly, communicating openly, being human to each other - there are the things we are starting to forget. And to be honest with you, these are precisely the things we ought to have bettered so that we are prepared for what is to come.
Can we NOT talk about AI?
We can’t. It’s here, it’s all encompassing and yes, it changes everything, yes but hear me out. This is not because it will take our jobs but because it will take away the veil of unexamined convention we had harboured at work. Things that ought to have been tested and were not, things that were never designed and thought out as they should have, things that worked held together by a corporate string and a prayer - they are all being exposed when we start attempting to automate.
There’s a rightful feel of unease in the air in every organisation where the “AI or DIE” wind swept through - people aren’t only afraid of being discarded in an instant as no longer of use -and the effects that has on their sense of reciprocal loyalty with their workplace!- but afraid of any action and decision they had ever made coming under scrutiny.
And they aren’t wrong to fear that. To keep things moving at this breakneck speed in business, we rightfully tolerated a high degree of inexactly and mistakes. The infamous tech and human debt. We took shortcuts, we may have tried unorthodox or unapproved things, we moved fast and made it works. If it all gets audited to be automated and rethought in terms of AI capabilities, will all of these past moments of inadequacy bust open? That is the dread. The vengeful arm of AI coming to collect on all our past mistakes and inferiority complexes. So people resist it. All of it. To keep the audit away. And when they do resist, they also entrench deeper into their distressed, unkind, unopen behaviours and that makes the automation and radical change towards AI even more urgent.
Organisations must first and foremost eliminate “AI Fear” before they will get to genuinely audit and automate their operations. They may think they have started doing it already as they are sinking millions into “will AI it all for you” empty promises from vendors of AI snake oil, but unless they change how their people feel, they won’t even be able to tell us what’s what inside the systems they built and we’ll all end up in Klarma or Duo PR and Employee Branding scandals.
Tell your people you are not firing them! (Unless of course if you are, case in which don’t lie to them, obvs:) but that you need them to be your most important asset in this new world- the all important humans in the loop. Tell them you need them to co-architect the automation with you so that you are aiming to create ways in which AI will remove blockers, take away unpleasant tasks and speed them up, not try to sabotage and denounce them as they feared.
Introduce Them to “Our Humans in the Loop”
Tell them it’s safe. That they can breathe in and be open and just focus on working hard on their emotional intelligence and their uniquely human bits as you need them in this new era. Make them truly believe and comprehend that the ask is new. The ask, once the machines do all the other work, is for empathy, for creation, for reading minds and having hearts, for learning to express ourselves and for being bold, loud, kind and open to each other.
Don’t just tell them so either, practical action - limit their BAU assignments and ensure the WIP always has tasks to better their human in the loop capabilities and EQ with weekly tasks such as “Work on cross-team connection” or “Hold a safe space B!tch Fest”. Then honestly and critically look at how performance is judged in your organisation - do you truly reward your employees for the human work? If not, if it’s not called out explicitly as a priority, change that right away because the incentives of yesteryear will not bring you the results you need today.
I don’t know what it will take for your people in particular to grow in these matters - perhaps they need communication coaching, psychological safety and belonging tools, radical honesty, clean conflict techniques, coaches that specialise in emotional intelligence or simply more trust in leadership, safety and clarity but you should be able to rummage through the massive Human Debt™ you’ve always felt you’re carrying around, and think of the quickest levers of bettering the employees emotional state then do it.
If you’re serious about AI, leave the technicalities of how to automate for later and be serious about your people first. Reassure them, hear them, see them truly and bring them along so they build this better future of loops and machines and humans.
If you’re one of the ones who believes humans no longer matter -good luck! Your Human Debt™ will explode, and Tech Debt won’t be far behind.
If not and you’re a true leader reading this, forget about teaching your employees about LLMs, MCPs, agentic AI, etc and instead first teach them to bring their humanity at work unabashedly and consistently. To feel and to open. To be alive and themselves. To use their gut feeling and their years of feeling and interacting. Rethink their value around not their easy-to-now-replicate skills, but instead their uniquely human selves, the collection of un-replicable experiences and emotions that AI can only parrot. Tell them this. That the loop needs both. That this is a live building exercise, that they need to lay bricks of human foundation and remain as AI sherpas and teachers, not competitors.
Bring and keep your people in a loop where machines compliment them and your stock points soar - that’s the only way we can realise on AI’s promise at scale.
And if we won’t, then sooner or later, in a reverse-Klarna move, AI will do away with the loop, the stock exchange and us all.
It would have to.
Related: Humans Dream, AI Codes: The Future of Creative Collaboration