Employees want AI to augment their skills
Generative AI is not conventional automation—replacing a human being 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 tool to simply automate tasks. Rather, it goes far beyond this role and should be seen as the transformative force it can be that amplifies, not replaces, human work.
Unfortunately, business leaders tend to see genAI and AI in general as a cheaper way to get things done. Their employees, on the other hand, see something different happening, according to an analysis published by Accenture. Ask employers and employees exactly how the AI transformation is happening, or what the results will be, “and it quickly becomes clear that we’re caught in a rut,” say the report’s authors, led by Accenture CTO Karthik Narain.
The key is to put people in charge of the direction AI will take with their jobs. Most see the role generative AI can play in helping and enhancing their work – this can lead to job satisfaction and opportunities for career advancement.
Generative AI, by its very nature, “is essentially a learning technology. It can improve and advance its capabilities over time, ultimately improving its value to the individual who uses it and to the organization as a whole,” said Narain and his co-authors. “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,” says the Accenture team.
They offer three key paths to achieving better results with an AI-enabled 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-driven AI tools is growing much faster and will touch many more types of workforce tasks. The question for enterprises is how to harness these skills and the enthusiasm of workers to reimagine their strategies.” However, at this time, 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 during the next three years.
- Agent workflows. There has been a lot of discussion 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 “a layer of abstraction across technology, handling lower-level tasks like writing code and connecting parts together. Instead of employees asking, ‘how can I write this software’ or ‘what software can perform this task’, they can ask ‘how can an agent help me achieve my goal?’
- Physical co-pilots. This is one area in which both frontline and manual workers will interface with AI. Technologies such as robots, exoskeletons and drones will be enhanced with AI 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 a very democratized technology that can be used by anyone, Accenture authors emphasize. 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, through “building 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.”
