The Coming Catastrophic Failure Of AI In Business

Typically, this time of year we look to the future and the future of AI isn’t very bright for people. I participated in a podcast on this topic earlier this month. OpenAI has released their template for AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and while this makes it more likely we’ll achieve AGI near term,  this AGI construct will not be assisting humans to be better but working to replace them. The definition is AGI represents highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity.

While the last four words appear to attempt to defuse the “outperforms” part of the definition, the conclusion would have to be that AGI will, once it matures, replace us and the “benefit” would be we no longer can work because AGI is doing that work for us autonomously. If we don’t have something like general universal income by that time, there are going to be a lot of very upset homeless unemployable people. The Twilight Zone episode called “The Brain Center at Whipple’s” explored this outcome years ago and it didn’t end well then either.

Let’s talk about where we need to focus AI so that this dire outcome doesn’t become unavoidable in our future.

AI In HR

Staff organizations typically are underfunded, and Human Resources (HR) is generally no exception. HR was conceived as an alternative to Unions which allowed for the care of employees without creating the adversity that Unions are designed to provide. When HR is done well Unions are redundant. However, the recent rise of Unions is just one indication that HR has largely become a compliance organization and has little focus on creating a better place to work where employees know where they stand, understand what it will take to advance, and problems with management are few and largely resolved in a fair and equitable fashion.

Today AI isn’t focused on making people more performant in their jobs, assuring work-life balance, or helping new workers acclimate to their new companies. AIs could be trained to provide employee guidance on needed retraining before the employee becomes obsolete, help them craft a career path that better matches their interests and capabilities, and to more effectively assure a healthy work-life balance.

While employees do need to be encouraged to advance, today too often they feel that the work they put in to advance isn’t appreciated and don’t realize that they are an integral part of their companies or how their contribution affects the firm’s performance. Thomas Watson Jr., often considered to be the true power behind IBM’s rise, used to visit his plant sites and randomly meet with relatively junior level employees and ask them how they contributed to IBM’s goals. If they couldn’t answer to his satisfaction, he didn’t penalize them; he penalized their managers.

AI could provide a better view to the employee as to their individual importance, and by doing so better inform the employee where their priorities should be if they want to advance. This same AI could also better inform management on employees that are overachieving and point out those that are treading water and taking credit for other’s efforts.

Rather than replacing people, AI could be used to help advance people to be more effective, more loyal, and have both better work and home lives.

AI Digital Assistant

Agentic AI is being used predominantly to replace people, like in sales or customer support. But where it should be prioritized is to allow employees to delegate tasks like filling out forms, creating status reports, assuring quality (like commenting code), and dealing with the large variety of annoying tasks that every employee has to deal with which have little to do with the actual work product.

As a digital assistant they could provide timely advice on decisions so that those decisions better meet both the needs of the individual and the company. “

There are an estimated 7 levels of agentic Ais coming; at least some of them should be focused on helping employees improve and retrain so they become and remain valuable contributors to the firm’s future.

Wrapping Up

Much like that old Twilight Zone episode AI is being excessively, in my opinion, focused on providing monetary benefits by replacing rather than assisting or supplementing employees. If this trend continues not only is quality likely to decline but employee problems are likely to increase and the path will, I believe, eventually become unsustainable.

We need to start focusing AI on making employees better and by doing so better assure the quality of the AIs that will be created while also improving the working conditions for everyone. If we don’t do that AIs and workers are going to come into increasing conflict which is likely not going to end well for either the AIs or the people, they displace. People are the foundation for AIs’ future and if we don’t use AIs to improve our people, the future for both employees and AIs is increasingly likely to be catastrophic.

About the author: As President and Principal Analyst of the Enderle Group, Rob Enderle provides regional and global companies with guidance in how to create credible dialogue with the market, target customer needs, create new business opportunities, anticipate technology changes, select vendors and products, and practice zero dollar marketing. For over 20 years Rob has worked for and with companies like Microsoft, HP, IBM, Dell, Toshiba, Gateway, Sony, USAA, Texas Instruments, AMD, Intel, Credit Suisse First Boston, ROLM, and Siemens.

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