275: AI Won’t Take Your Job, But It Will Redefine It

Aoife O’Brien [00:00:00]:

Are you worried about AI? Maybe you’re worried that it will take your job, or maybe you’re worried that you will get left behind in some way. I’ve spoken a few times recently on the podcast about how I use AI in my business. I’m actually quite positive about it and it’s really helpful. But I know there are also downsides, and from some recent conversations that I’ve had with some of my global clients, they were talking about some of the stresses that their employees are feeling in relation to AI and the uncertainty and the fear, job losses. So it’s something I wanted to cover on today’s podcast. And so if this is relevant for you, listen on. If you’re a leader in a global organization and you are trying to manage this stuff, today’s episode is definitely for you. This is the Happier at Work podcast.

Aoife O’Brien [00:00:48]:

I’m your host, Aoife o’, Brien, career and culture strategist for global leaders and teams. I read an article recently in Fortune magazine about this concept of quiet cracking and what that means. And it’s essentially, it’s saying that about 50% of the workforce are just under so much pressure at the moment, under pressure to do more with less, under pressure to perform, to use AI. They’re worried about jobs, and it’s costing companies globally 438 billion in lost productivity. And I definitely feel that myself as well. In my own business, I’m using AI all the time, and I am trying to get stuff done and be more productive, but at the same time, it’s so overwhelming. There is so much that I could potentially do, getting through a lot of stuff, but how to manage all of that information at the same time? So I just want to acknowledge that and say I am aware and it’s happening to me as well. And there are so many people that this is impacting globally.

Aoife O’Brien [00:01:50]:

This is causing a huge amount of stress in the workforce as well. People feel that the companies are understaffed, that there’s no opportunities for progression, or at least the opportunities are not really clear to them. And so it’s causing a lot of stress for people. Some of the key fears that I see out there in relation to AI, well, the first is the job displacement. So what if AI can do my entire job? What does that actually mean for me? What if it can do everything that I’m currently doing? What if my tasks are all those kind of repetitive tasks and they’re based on analysis? And if I think back to my own corporate days, probably AI could do a lot of the role that I used to do. And it’s a scary thought. And it’s about embracing, well, what does that mean for me in my career? And what does that mean next? There’s also the loss of control and the lack of clarity in organizations in relation to AI specifically. So, you know, previously maybe we felt a much greater sense of control.

Aoife O’Brien [00:02:50]:

And I talk about control in the sense of having autonomy and being involved in decisions that are made that are going to impact on us. And if we’re not involved in those decisions, if those decisions come from the top and we haven’t been part of a discussion, the decision has already been made and just kind of landing with us, it gives us a great lack of control over what we’re able to actually do, which thwarts one of our basic fundamental needs for autonomy. So that’s what’s going on in relation to that, that we feel this sense of a lack of control and perhaps, perhaps a lack of clarity as well, because things haven’t necessarily been explained to us. Then there’s the dehumanization. So AI is not a person, it’s not a human. It can’t empathize with us, no matter how positive it can be. And sharing, you know, it says things like, oh, Aoife, that’s a brilliant idea. But it doesn’t think that it’s a brilliant idea.

Aoife O’Brien [00:03:46]:

It’s just using those words. And I think that’s one of the impacts of using AI in a lot of these situations is we’re taking the human element out. We’re taking that empathy is a way. We’re taking that human connection, which is so, so important for motivation at work, for feeling a sense of fulfillment, is having that connection with other humans. And that’s being taken away, that’s being eroded by more and more AI activities and AI tasks. Then the final fear I want to talk about is the skills gap. So if you don’t already have those technical skills and you feel like you’re going to be obsolete because you don’t have those skills already, and it’s something that you’re going to have to learn how to do. But what if you’re not that techy? What if you don’t really get it? For me, I think it’s just starting small.

Aoife O’Brien [00:04:36]:

When I first started using AI, and it’s really hard for me to remember a time when I wasn’t using AI. It’s. It’s so embedded in what I do now. But I’m sure when I very first started, I just started with some small queries and interestingly, I met up with a friend yesterday and she was asking me, and I hate to bring up this, the C word this early in the year, but she was asking me about Christmas and she had to come up with a plan. And I said, well, why don’t you ask ChatGPT about that? And it hadn’t even occurred to her. So I think as you’re going through your day, why don’t you think, well, what if I used AI to support me with this part of my role and start small with those little kind of queries. I also wanted to share a couple of examples of companies who’ve recently got it kind of wrong. So Klarna, which is a Swedish company, they let go around 700 customers, service reps, and replace them with AI.

Aoife O’Brien [00:05:31]:

And what happened as a result of that was customer service scores went down and they ended up rehiring back some of their human workforce and now they’re taking more of a hybrid approach. And similarly, in Australia, the Commonwealth bank of Australia did something similar. And again with customer services representatives, where they let go quite a number of customer services, same thing happened. The quality of the service decreased. And I think the lesson here is that we can be so fast to think, oh, well, that’s something that AI can do. But there are more considerations beyond just efficiency. We need to think about the impact that something is going to have on our customers, on our overall bottom line, on our brand and reputation as well. And before we’re so quick to decide that AI can completely take over, we need to really understand what the impact of something is going to be.

Aoife O’Brien [00:06:26]:

And so for me, I always talk about the, you know, trying to do a pilot on something, try first without making a kind of a decision that’s going to impact so, so many people. I think we’re so keen to move fast with AI that sometimes we forget to think about these things and make sure that we think things through rather than moving fast and letting something backfire. Maybe we’re trying to get ahead of our competitors, so we’re trying to move as quickly as possible, but make sure we don’t do something that’s going to end up backfiring on us. And some of the hidden areas, then from those two examples, I just wanted to touch on some of those as well. There’s the quality loss that I mentioned. So the quality scores from customers went right down in both cases because the AI wasn’t able to do the same kind of job that a human was able to do. Perhaps they lacked empathy. There was Also the customer backlash.

Aoife O’Brien [00:07:23]:

So customers started complaining because they weren’t getting the results that they needed. They weren’t getting the information that they needed that a human previously would have been able to. I think we can agree then that there is the underestimation of the human skills that are required for some of these roles. So as I mentioned earlier, empathy is so, so important when dealing with customers as well. And a bot can’t be empathetic with someone, it can be factual and it’s really hard to train for that stuff. That takes the human touch as well. Then there’s the brand risk. So what do customers now think of both of those financial institutions, both Klarna and cba? What’s the perception in the market about those? Have they had a reputational damage because of the approach that they took? So if you want to get AI right and if you want to avoid the kind of fears that people are feeling right now or allay those fears that people are already feeling, it’s about starting small.

Aoife O’Brien [00:08:21]:

So try a pilot. And I’m working with one organization at the moment on something that’s kind of related to what I touched on earlier. So something I shared earlier is people are not clear about the progression or the opportunities that exist, exist in the organization and that makes them stressed and demotivated and thinking that there’s no opportunities necessarily for them. So I’m currently working on a pilot with a global organization around just that about using my no show Grow framework about understanding how to strategically manage your career and look for opportunities. Even if there’s not a next level up opportunity, it could be an opportunity to move to a different team to broaden your skill set, all of these kinds of things. But we’re using AI to be able to do that as well. So we’re embedding that the process. We’re starting small, we’re doing one team, we’re running a pilot and then we’re going to start rolling it out globally.

Aoife O’Brien [00:09:14]:

So start small, start a pilot. Pick one thing that you could potentially do. Number two then is maintain humans in the loop and ask people who are doing the job well, what parts can the AI or the robot not necessarily do and having a look side by side about the performance with the humans as well. So as I mentioned, Klarna is going back to this hybrid model where they’re using AI bots, but they’re also keeping humans as part of that process as well. So it’s a hybrid, it’s not just AI, it’s got a human element to that as well. Number three then is about tracking more than just efficiency. So I think the big thing with AI is that it saves so much time. It can be much more efficient than humans because it can do things much, much more quickly.

Aoife O’Brien [00:10:02]:

But there are other factors that are more important than efficiency. So customer satisfaction, it’s not all about saving time, it’s about well, how do our customers perceive us and how are they experiencing our organization, our brand, our people or our bots? How are they experiencing things so measure more than just efficiency when we’re thinking about AI and when we’re looking at those things. The fourth one then is about communicating openly and engage people in the conversation so it doesn’t feel this top down decision that’s already been made, we need to save money, we need to increase our profits. So we’ve made this decision already. Like that is not going to land very well. How do you engage people in the conversation and ask them how they can use AI in their roles day to day, how AI can improve efficiency and what they might do differently and what the watch outs are in the day to day roles of what they’re doing, how is that going to be impacted? And it’s not about fear mongering and saying that they’re going to be replaced by AI, but it’s about upskilling people in how they can actually use AI on a day to day basis. And that brings me on to my fifth point, which is about upskilling and redefining how, how people actually do the roles. So is there something that is very monotonous, tedious, very repetitive that an AI could potentially take over in that role? Okay, well then maybe that’s not part of the job description anymore and people can then elevate and focus more on strategic roles and decision making.

Aoife O’Brien [00:11:40]:

A slight aside. So in the previous times when I’ve talked about AI, one of the big things that comes up is not outsourcing decision making to AI. AI cannot make decisions. That’s the human’s job is to make those strategic decisions. I fall for that sometimes myself. Asking AI, asking ChatGPT, what should I do? Actually I shouldn’t be doing that at all. I’m the one ultimately who has to make that decision. So don’t outsource your decisions to AI, whatever you do and then thinking about the kinds of things that we could potentially pilot.

Aoife O’Brien [00:12:16]:

So I mentioned this career development AI, whether you want to call it a platform that I’m piloting with the organization that I’m working with. So that’s Something that you could potentially pilot, but there are other things that you could pilot as well. The big thing, and I spoke about this in my last solo episode, is meetings. So how can you use AI in meetings? Especially if they’re online meetings, but even in person, recording the meeting. And I can write out the notes, AI can summarize the key points and what the actions are. So use AI in your meetings to make your meetings more efficient and more effective and focus on speaking rather than having to take notes furiously. You can just share ideas in those meetings, make those decisions. AI can capture it, and then tell you what happened.

Aoife O’Brien [00:13:08]:

Now I have an example of this where I had a meeting with a client and they shared with me afterwards the notes from that meeting and the key action points. And AI had picked up everything perfectly. Like, I just thought it was absolutely fantastic. Then there is content drafting. So rather than starting from a blank page, how can you get AI to support you with the draft content? It’s not what you’re going to copy and paste and share, but at least it gets you over the line. It gets you away from staring at a blank page. I know how, how awful that can be when you’re like, I don’t know what it is I want to say here. So I can help with that.

Aoife O’Brien [00:13:45]:

To start with that content process, whether it’s a presentation, whether it’s a speech, whatever it might be, AI can help you with that. Even drafting a structure of how it might look. And then I know I fe this is what I have so far. How do you think that it can be improved? Is there something that I’m missing? Is there something that’s kind of glaringly obvious that I should be including in this point that I want to make? Then there’s data analysis. So I touched on this and I realized I didn’t really share what I did previously. So if you’re new around here, I worked in the market research in fast moving consumer goods for 20 years prior to starting my business. So a lot of that was to do with data analysis. Analyzing huge amounts of data through a database and then presenting findings and insights and turning insights into stories and stories into recommendations for our clients, which was super interesting.

Aoife O’Brien [00:14:41]:

Ticked all the boxes on what it is that, that I love to do. I continue to do research now. So at the moment I’m doing some research into imposter syndrome. I’ll put a link to where you can take that survey if you’re interested. But I continue to do that. But I don’t have to analyze the data to that level of detail anymore. I have AI who can support now I will obviously double check since I’m a research and data nerd. I’m going to check what’s what the AI has done to make sure that it’s okay.

Aoife O’Brien [00:15:11]:

But I don’t have to. I can save so much time on the analysis side of things now that I have AI to support and pull out trends and all of that kind of good stuff in relation to data analysis. Another way that AI can help is or that you can pilot something is customer FAQs. So if you are recording conversations then you can summarize what are the key questions that people have that are repeatedly asked again and again and again. And update your FAQ section on your website so people can access that information without having to go through AI or without having to go through an agent at all to get that information. If it’s something that comes up again and again and again. And then the last one, but by no means the least, is the admin side of things. Are there things that can be automated, Automated in some way, something that you have to do again and again? And I’m thinking again back to my corporate days where we had regular reports that needed to be updated, those kinds of things.

Aoife O’Brien [00:16:14]:

How can you use AI to make it so much easier to produce those kinds of reports? It could be to do with meetings that we touched on already. It could be to do with any of those small admin related tasks that you have. Why not pilot using AI to support with that and see how that goes. So that’s it for today’s episode. I really hope you took some actions away from it. If there’s something that you’re going to start or stop as a result of listening to today’s episode, I’d really love to know. I’d love for you to get involved in the conversation. As I always say, I’m Most active on LinkedIn, so feel free to connect with me there and get involved in the conversation.

Aoife O’Brien [00:16:55]:

If you’re enjoying the Happier at Work podcast, I’d love if you could leave a rating or a review on your favorite platform. And I suppose the final thought that I want to leave you with is I’m all about leveraging AI to reimagine how we work on a day to day basis. I’m still really positive about AI. I think there are huge opportunities if we do it in the right way.