Employees want AI to enhance their skills
Generative AI is not conventional automation—replacing human with software—and should not be treated as such. It would be a waste of time and effort, not to mention an example of low expectations, to present genAI as a means to simply automate tasks. Instead, it goes far beyond that role and should be seen as the transformative force it can be that augments, not replaces, human labor.
Unfortunately, business leaders tend to see genAI and artificial intelligence in general as a cheaper way to get things done. Their employees, on the other hand, see something different happening, a analysis published by Accenture relates. Ask employers and workers exactly how the AI transformation is happening, or what the results will be, “and it quickly becomes clear that we’re in for a glimpse,” the report’s authors, led by Accenture’s CTO Karthik Narainsituation.
The key is to put people in charge of the direction AI takes with their jobs. Most see the role genetic AI can play in assisting and enhancing their work — it can lead to job satisfaction and career advancement opportunities.
Generative AI, by its very nature, “is inherently a learning technology. It can enhance and advance its skills over time, ultimately improving its value to the individual using it and to the organization as a whole,” report Narain and colleagues. “In other words, the more people use it, the better it gets, and then the more people want to use it.”
Their employers, on the other hand, tend to take a narrower view of AI as the path to greater automation. “It’s a situation that creates uncertainty and mistrust and risks hindering the adoption and potential of the technology,” the Accenture team says.
They offer three key ways to achieve the best results with an AI-savvy workforce:
- Automation Accessibility: “The increasing accessibility of AI is what is driving bottom-up autonomy in the workforce. While we’ve had no-code/low-code in the past, the adoption and use of today’s natural language-based AI tools is growing much faster and will touch many more types of workforce tasks. The question for businesses is how to harness this potential and employee enthusiasm to rethink their strategies.” However, currently only 47% of executives surveyed by Accenture say they expect their organizations to make genAI tools significantly to fully accessible to their employees to automate tasks and workflows in the next three years.
- Agent workflows. There has been a lot of talk in recent months about the potential of AI agents to solve complex cognitive tasks, and this will be a boost for people in organizations. They can serve as “an abstraction layer across technology, handling lower-level tasks like writing code and connecting pieces together. Instead of asking, “how can I write this software” or “what software can perform this task,” employees can ask, “how can an agent help me achieve my goal?”
- Natural co-pilots. This is one area where frontline and manual workers will interface with artificial intelligence. Technologies such as robots, exoskeletons and drones will be enhanced with artificial intelligence and genAI to achieve “greater contextual understanding of the world and the ability to take more flexible and general-purpose actions in it.”
GenAI is highly democratized technology that can be used by anyone, Accenture’s editors point out. However, they warn, “the pace of diffusion will stall if people are uncertain about what the future holds.” The key to AI success is giving people the freedom to learn and discover how AI can enhance their skills, “creating small automations, finding efficiencies and seeing which new innovations work and which don’t,” they add. . This “will give you a jump start into the future, pushing you far beyond what strict automation ever could.”
