We have the conversation about AI all wrong. Well, mostly wrong. What’s right is that AI is going to drive the economy in ways both predictable and unpredictable. It is going to fundamentally alter how people work. All people, not just coders or people doing repetitive work. If you aren’t at least considering how AI can change the way you do your work, you are missing out.
But honestly, that’s just about all that is right. AI is new and new is scary. It is convenient to blame AI for the layoffs that businesses would have made anyway. This is not helping. At a time when we should be doubling down on educating our workforce, we are deemphasizing national standards around education. Also not helping. We need smart people now more than ever. AI doesn’t’ specialize in creating new. Humans specialize in creating new and making illogical connections, that turn out to be brilliant.
Great thinkers are what we need, but instead we have a workforce petrified about AI. The Pew Research Center has found over half of the workforce (52%) is fearful about how AI will impact their work. Let’s be honest, when people are afraid, when the smell of fear is in the air, humans, who are the employees that make up our workforce, do not give their best. They have one eye on their next job and one eye on their bank account. This is not a glass half full issue. If enthusiasm and fear are in equal measure, fear wins. From, Rozin & Royzman (2001): “Negativity bias, negativity dominance, and contagion,” Personality and Social Psychology Review
This is negativity dominance — the finding that negative and positive information are not weighted equally, even when present in equal measure. One point of friction outweighs many points of enthusiasm.
This is urgent for businesses. We can’t have half the workforce disengaged and petrified during one of the most exciting periods of change in history. We need to figure out how to get the workforce ready and address the fear. HEAD ON. In large businesses, human resources departments must be on the leading edge of understanding AI. Only then can they be capable partners to business leaders in the design and implementation of programs needed to experiment and adapt business processes, workflows and development to an AI world. In small businesses, leaders who are already stretched too thin – doing too many administrative things in addition to THE THING – have to outsource, appoint or hire someone to take on workforce readiness.
What does this mean? It doesn’t mean what work goes away. It doesn’t mean scaring your employees and wondering out loud and: can I hire fewer people?
It means deeply understanding the difference between humans, humanity, creativity, and the essence of living intelligence vs. artificial intelligence. It means getting your workforce ready for constant change and an era of experimentation, which is scary and potentially destabilizing if not handled right. Because the negativity bias is real, the work lies in creating an environment where enthusiasm wins. Enthusiasm gives us energy, it motivates us, it inspires us to take risks. Our work as leaders is to provide the culture and the tools employees need to have confidence in experimentation and trust that if their job changes, they will be retrained or given time to find something new in a respectful way.
AI is cool and can research, crunch numbers, create PowerPoints, code and do other stuff really fast. But it cannot really create something new – not yet anyway. It cannot fathom “new”in a way that humans can. If you don’t believe me, maybe you will believe Claude. I asked it to be honest with me about what AI can do and what it cannot do. Here are some of the responses:
No point of view rooted in lived experience
Human creativity is often driven by something — a frustration, an obsession, a specific memory, a stake in the outcome. AI’s output is driven by statistical patterns in text.
Gravitates toward the median
Real creative breakthroughs often come from someone willing to make a choice most people would call wrong and defend it. AI doesn’t have the conviction (or the stakes) to do that reliably.
BOTTOM LINE
AI is a good creative collaborator and a mediocre creative source. It’s most useful in the room with someone who has actual creative judgment — generating raw material, offering unexpected combinations, doing the grunt work of drafts — while that person decides what’s actually good, surprising, or true.
What steps can all organizations, large and small, take to prepare for what I suspect will be a long period of experimentation and exploration?
- Expressly define the solely human traits that drive your business forward. Make sure everyone knows them. Amend your values to reflect this. If you don’t have values, create them. Values make us human and are the guardrails between right and wrong when no one is looking. We know that AI does not offer this – tragically, in some cases.
- Be explicit that you do not know exactly what will change but be clear on your organization’s vision. If there is a north star that your entire workforce understands and believes in, the excitement about achieving it will guide your people through uncertainty.
- Help your employees navigate the change. Give them language and a framework. They will not have it on their own, and the general press has it wrong. Talk about and implement a change framework that is practical and real for your business. Take the mystery out of what change means. Do not ignore how unsettling change is. This increases fear.
- Most importantly, be honest about what you know and don’t know and communicate regularly about how your thinking is evolving. Take your workforce on your thinking journey with you. Fear melts away when there is a track to walk on. Even if the track isn’t perfect, it helps your people understand the process of change. It helps build trust. Trust is essential in creating employee engagement and workforce readiness.
- If you lay people off, be explicit about why. It is not AI. It is because the work has changed and now the company requires new skills. This dynamic has always been true, but AI is accelerating the pace of skill change. Design and implement reskilling and upskilling programs that are mandatory and expressly designed for your latest work processes and workflow. Be intentional. Don’t leave it to them to figure it out. If the employee cannot learn new skills, be thoughtful and generous.
This leads me back to education. Education can happen formally in schools and at work. Being able to think as a human is mandatory for success in today’s economy. Skills will evolve and change, but our essential humanity allows us to learn new things, imagine new things, and do good things.
A learning, change agile mindset is the key to unlocking your workforce. It can be done but takes thoughtful planning.
Personally, I am excited to see where this takes us. I plan to lean into my humanity as only humans can: messy, enthusiastic and intentional.
