Getting AI and people to work together

It seems as if it should be simple. Here’s this great new tool that has the potential to make everyone’s work easier, faster, and better. But in fact, many companies are finding that their investments in AI are not paying off as they had hoped. That’s partly because it often takes time for new technologies to reach their full value. For example, both the printing press and electricity took a long time to catch on. Researchers have identified the “productivity J curve,” where productivity initially dips until organizations fully adapt to a new technology.

Why AI investments so often fall short

But there’s another problem with AI. AI doesn’t know how people actually do their jobs. So for AI to do some part of your work, you have to help train the AI. If you think that’s going to result in you losing your job, you’re not going to be very enthusiastic about that project.

More and more companies are realizing that their biggest challenge is getting people and AI to work together. Some have experimented with having one person in charge of both AI implementation and HR. But it’s not so easy to find someone who really understands both.

So here’s the question: Would it be better to have someone in charge who knows a lot about AI but not so much about HR? Or would it be preferable to choose a leader who knows more about HR than about AI? Peter Cappelli, in a recent Harvard Business Review article titled “What It Takes to Combine HR and AI,” suggests that it is probably easier to teach HR leaders about AI than it is to teach AI leaders about HR. However, as Cappelli puts it, “For tech people, whose work is very much based around domain expertise, reporting to HR would likely make their heads explode.”

Instead, it is probably more effective to create pairings of an AI leader and an HR leader to oversee small projects. I can envision that these will be challenging marriages—but they’re probably the best way to get the job done.

If you’d like to talk about the human side of AI adoption, contact me at ggolden@gailgoldenconsulting.com.