How to learn to work with your new AI coworker

AI will undoubtedly become a bigger presence in your working life over the next few years. In fact, it likely already is, even without you knowing it. According to a recent study by Gallup, nearly all Americans (99%, in fact) use products that involve artificial intelligence features, but (64%) don’t even realize it.

Our current level of AI use may seem subtle and harmless—think virtual assistants, navigation apps, or weather-forecasting websites. But the speed of new technology is fast and the promises it holds for transforming our work are too tempting for many companies to pass up. Like it or not, no matter your industry, AI is likely going to be your new coworker.

So how can we adapt to work with AI, rather than training it to replace us? On the most recent episode of The New Way We Work, I spoke to Nigel Vaz, the CEO of Publicis Sapient, a consultancy focused on digital transformation.

Vaz has been helping companies adapt to new technology for decades and sees both parallels and significant differences between our current AI transition and the dot-com boom of the 1990s. 

How this time is different

Vaz points out that when the internet first started to change businesses, many leaders were skeptical that it would have a big impact. E-commerce sales accounted for such a small percent of sales, for example, and it took 20 years for the shift to fully take place.

Now, he says, leaders remember how transformational the internet was and are more eager to embrace the changes that AI will bring. “The difference this time around is everybody’s interested in ‘What is AI? How is AI going to manifest? What does it mean for my business?’” he says. “But there is a recognition that it could be a significant driver.” He also notes that the speed of change is much faster now than it was before.

“We are really asking organizations and people to evolve the way they work on an exponential basis,” he says.

How employees and leaders can adapt

“The technological transformation is the easy part,” Vaz says. “It’s the people transformation alongside the technological transformation. That’s the hard part.”

So how can employees and leaders adapt to the speed of tech’s advancements? Vaz says that the average person can (and should) tune out all of the discussions around chip development and instead focus on the applications themselves and what problems they help solve—and what data they are trained on. He advises that companies should look at their needs and see if general AI tools can help or if they need customized tools.

Learn, unlearn, and relearn

So what about employees who are afraid of losing their jobs to AI? Vaz says that the nature of work is ever evolving and it’s not the ability to perform tasks that makes an employee valuable; it’s their ability to learn. “If you obsess about what you know, you are always fundamentally going to be less valuable to an organization. I think what you have to obsess about is your ability to learn,” he says. He uses the expression “learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

“The single biggest gift an organization can give you, and you can give yourself, is this mindset that what we value is your ability to adapt and to learn and to evolve as things are evolving,” he says.

Listen to the full episode for more on how companies and employees should prepare for AI changes, how they should be vetting new tech, and where tech is going in the future.

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