In this segment of “Office Optional with Larry English,” Larry discusses how AI is going to affect your company culture.
Every business will be impacted by AI and will have AI incorporated throughout its operations. Your company’s culture will impact how quickly and successfully an organization can adopt AI. And, done well, AI can actually improve company culture.
How Can AI Boost Company Culture?
An MIT working paper showed ChatGPT raised productivity, decreased inequality between workers by helping employees with fewer specialized skills, and enhanced job satisfaction and self-efficacy. It also brought about both concern and excitement related to the use of AI technologies. Among MIT survey respondents who implemented AI and saw improved efficiency and decision making, “75 percent also saw improvements in team morale, collaboration and collective learning,” it said. “Culture change from using AI transcends the legitimate, but myopic, promise that AI will liberate workers from drudgery.” AI’s high level of refinement means it can enhance the performance of individuals and teams, streamline workflows, and even complete some tasks that enable employees to focus on more meaningful work. Once mundane careers can now be exciting, as employees can work more efficiently and branch into other areas they may have never had the opportunity to explore. As this becomes the reality at an organization, employees can feel empowered to perform work that increases business value with creative and innovative solutions. Recently, Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist based at Stanford University, and MIT economists Danielle Li and Lindsey R. Raymond published a working paper, “Generative AI at Work,” that showed the effects of AI on a software company that implemented it to aid in its customer service responses. Among its findings were that access to the tool increased employee productivity by an average of 14 percent and that customers and employees were happier. On the customer side, customer ratings of support staff increased, and customers were less likely to elevate the request to a supervisor. On the company side, new-hire turnover decreased, and lower-skilled employees with fewer specialized skills saw a jump in their performance. This improvement can be, at least partially, credited to the AI tool using successful conversations to create answers for other questions. "It used to be that high-skilled workers would come up with a good answer, and that would only help them and their customer," Brynjolfsson told NPR. "Now that good answer gets amplified and used by people throughout the organization."Determining Your Culture’s Readiness for AI
“Business culture affects AI deployments, and AI deployments affect business culture,” the MIT Sloan Management Review’s Big Ideas Research Report said. To realize these benefits, though, leaders must build a culture that supports AI implementation and the changes that come along with any new innovation. Every company will have its own cultural nuances in implementing a controversial and somewhat unpredictable technology. Everything from the nature of work for an organization to employee demographics and the IT security infrastructure in place will play a role in how AI is perceived, deployed and used at an organization. When considering what types of AI to implement and how to deploy them at your organization, one of your primary considerations should be a readiness for change throughout the company. Questions for leadership include:- How have previous changes been received? Start by reviewing previous changes within your company. What cultural issues came up, and how were they addressed by leadership? Was the initiative ultimately a success, or what led to its failure?
- What is the level of interest in innovation within your company? Do employees show enthusiasm for new ideas, and are they willing to take measured risks?
- How do you want your organization to use AI, and have you communicated it to all employees? Creating an approach and policy to AI helps remove doubt about using it as a tool and sets standards and best practices that are consistent with your organization’s culture.
- What is the trust level of your organization? Trust is a huge component of implementing change successfully, and it goes both ways. Do leaders trust their employees to take measured risks and to comply with stated policies? Do employees believe leaders are honest and have their best interests in mind? Are leaders modeling transparency?
