Humans + AI

"Fiction has this unprecedented power in tech spaces. The more I started talking to engineers about their technical problems, the more I realized there's so much more that humanities could offer."

–Nina Begus

Nina Begus is a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, leading a research group on artificial humanities, and the founder of InterpretAI. She is author of Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI, which received an Artificiality Institute Award, and First Encounters with AI.

Website:

ninabegus.com

LinkedIn Profile:

Nina Begus

 Book:

Artificial Humanities

Ross Dawson: Nina, it is wonderful to have you on the show.

Nina Begus: Thank you for having me.

Ross Dawson: You've written this very interesting book, Artificial Humanities, and I think there's a lot to dig into. But what does that mean? What do you mean by artificial humanities?

Nina Begus: Well, this was really a new framework that I've developed while I was working on the relationship between AI and fiction, and I started working on this about 15 years ago when I realized that fiction has this unprecedented power in tech spaces. So this is how it all started, but then the more I started talking to engineers about their technical problems, the more I realized there's so much more that humanities could offer in this collaborative, generative approach that I've developed.

I would say that now, as the field stands, it's really a way to explore and demonstrate how humanities—as broad as science and technology studies, literary studies, film, philosophy, rhetoric, history of technology—how all of these fields can help us address the most pressing issues in AI development and use. And it's been important to me that this approach uses traditional humanistic methods, theory, conceptual work, history, ethical approaches, but also that it's collaborative and exploratory and experimental in this way that you can look back into the past and at the present to make a more informed choice about the future. You can speculate about different possibilities with it.

Ross Dawson: Well, art is an expression of the human psyche, or even more, it is the fullest expression of humanity, and that's what art tries to do. Also, I'm a deep believer in archetypes, human archetypes, and things which are intrinsic to who we are, and that's something which you can only really uncover through the arts.

Now we have arguably seen all these archetypes play out in real time, these modern myths being created right now in the stories being told of how AI is being created. So I think it's extraordinarily relevant to look back at how we have depicted machines through our history and our relationship to them.

Nina Begus: Yes, this is the reason why I started exploring this topic, actually, because there were so many ancient myths, these archetypal narratives that I've seen at the same time, both in technological products that were coming to the market and in the way technologists were thinking about it, and also in fictional products and films and novels in the way we imagined AI. I framed my book around the Pygmalion myth, but there are many, many other myths—Prometheus, Narcissus, the Big Brother narrative, and so on—that are very much doing work in the AI space.

The reason why I chose the Pygmalion myth is because it's so bizarre in many ways: you have this myth where a man creates an artificial woman, and then in the process of creation, falls in love with her. So there's the creation of the human-like, and there's also this relationality with the human-like. You would think this would not be a common myth, but quite the opposite—I found it everywhere I looked. It wasn't called the Pygmalion myth, but the motif was there. I found it on the Silk Road, in ancient folk tales, in Native American folk tales, North Africa, and so on.

So I think this kind of story is actually telling us a lot about how humans are not rational, how we have some very deeply embedded behaviors in us, and one of them is that we anthropomorphize everything, including machines.So I think this was a really important takeaway that we got already from the early days of AI with the first chatbot, Eliza. We've learned that that will be a feature of us relating to machines.

Ross Dawson: So Joseph Campbell called the hero's journey the monomyth, as in, there is a single myth. And I guess what you are doing here is—well, if you agree with that, which I'd be interested in—is that there are facets. The classic hero's journey is quite simple, but there are facets of that monomyth, or something intrinsic to who we are, that is around this creation. And in this case, as you say, this relation we have with what we have created. Would you relate that at all to Joseph Campbell's work?

Nina Begus: I haven't thought about it in this way, because I thought about myth and myths more and less of a storytelling issue, which here is definitely happening—the hero goes on a task, returns back changed, and maybe changes something in the community. The myths that I was looking into and the metaphors that I was exploring, primarily this huge metaphor of AI as a human mind, as an artificial reason—I think it works differently. It's less of a narrative; it's more of an imaginary of how or towards what we are building.

I think this is a big problem, actually, because the imaginary around AI is very poor. What you get is mostly imagining machine intelligence on human terms, and a lot of people are bothered by that in the AI discourse—right, when you say the machine thinks, or the machine learns, or it has a mind, and some people go as far as to say it has consciousness. I think this kind of debate is actually not that productive. I think it's more important to see how all these different AI products that we've created—and mostly when we talk about AI, people think of language models now—are very much designed as a sort of character, almost as an artificial human that, in literature, authors have been creating for a long time.

So I think in that case, we can get back to a hero's journey. But I think what I was looking at was actually more on the surface level of what kind of shortcuts we are using with these metaphors that we're employing when building and using AI. I think the book makes a really good case showing that, yes, this is actually a very cultural technology. It's very much informed by our imaginaries. One surprising part of it was really how hard it was to break out of this human mold. It was pretty much impossible to find examples of machines that are not exclusively human-like. I think Stanislaw Lem is one of the rare writers who can consistently deliver this kind of imaginary.

Even looking at more recent works, like popular films such as Hollywood's Ex Machina or Her, you can see how the technologists themselves would say, "Oh, we were influenced by this film," in a way that it affirmed their product development trajectory. You can see it now, at this moment, with OpenAI launching companionship. So in many ways, not a lot has changed.

Ross Dawson: Yeah, there's a lot to dig into there. I just want to go back—in a sense, Pygmalion is a metaphor, but it's also a myth. It is a story: creates a woman, and then falls in love with her, and then whatever happens from there. There is this, something happens, and then something else happens. That's what a story is. I think that can impact the implicit metaphor, but coming back to the metaphor—so George Lakoff wrote the beautiful book Metaphors We Live By. I think the way the brain works is in metaphors and analogies to a very large degree. Some of those are enabling metaphors, and some of those are not very useful metaphors.

I think part of your point is that some of the metaphors that we have for thinking about AI and machines are not useful. There may be, or we could create, some metaphors that are more useful. So, what are some of the most disabling metaphors, and what are some of the ones which could be more constructive?

Nina Begus: Yes, So I think this main metaphor that I've mentioned—of AI as a human mind—is very limiting. I think it really limits the machinic potential to actually do something good with it. The fact that we're still using the criteria that were made for humans, like different criteria developed on human language—the Turing test was one of them, right, a while ago. Now we have stricter ones. I think this tells you a lot about how we actually evaluate AI and how even these benchmarks that are supposed to be quantitative are actually often qualitative, often stories, like mini-narratives.

But yeah, when we look at different metaphors in this space, there are other ones that also emerge from fiction. I mentioned the Big Brother, the AI as an Oracle, and we need to be aware that these ideas inform the very interaction we have with AI. If we think of it as a mirror, we're going to use it differently—it's almost as a bouncing board. If we think of it as a teacher, or as a coach, or as an assistant, it would again create a different use. So I think there are a lot of these metaphors that the companies themselves are trying to decide which one they will go with, because it completely changes the user and the interaction.

I think they're also very cultural, even though you might say, "Oh, it's a categorical mistake to treat a machine as a human." I think you can see this kind of treatment across, at least in part, and it doesn't mean that we consider it human. It just means that we're engaging with it on our own terms, as if it was human.

Now, what could be productive? I do think metaphors, even if they're not accurate, can be productive. My goal, really, with the book was to break out of this projection of what the machine could be, to find in this exploratory way other directions, other landscapes where we couldn't go because we're being limited by our imaginary, by our ideas. So in this way, I think humanistic approaches can be very helpful to designers, to technology builders, to artists, to explore the novelty that so many of these sectors are after.

Ross Dawson: Yeah, and I guess people latch on to what they know. I think that's part of the thing where with AI, "Oh, it's like a human. Let's treat it like a human, and let's make it like a human." It is, amongst other things, a lack of imagination. That's where the humanities, the arts, can offer us—those who have the imagination to be able to envisage different possibilities or relationships.

But I guess part of it is also that humans relate, and so we have learned to relate to other humans and also to other animals and hopefully to nature as well. But these are all established patterns of relating. So do we need to discover in ourselves new ways of relating to new categories—things which are not humans, not animals, and not nature?

Nina Begus: Exactly, this is the exact problem we're dealing with, and because we're dealing with a yet unexplored, yet undefined relation, and we're using old, outdated terms for that relation. This is why we don't really have a good way of describing it and establishing it. It will take a while for this to develop, which is fine, but we need to realize that there are some concepts that we're using that we better leave behind and go ahead by building new ones.

This is why I think it's really important to work in a more interdisciplinary collaboration, so that you can see what you can actually build from the technical perspective, so that you can see what these machines are actually capable of. Because you usually don't know when you create them right?Machine learning is sort of exploratory by design.

Ross Dawson: So, just to call it out more explicitly, what are the metaphors you think are the most destructive or most inappropriate, and what are some of the ones which you think are the most promising?

Nina Begus: Well, I'm just writing on the Midas myth, which is sort of the opposite of the Pygmalion myth. With Pygmalion, you lean into that human imitation, but with Midas, you lean into the liminality that Midas presents as this sort of hybrid creature. I think leaning into the boundaries that we draw for ourselves—and now AI is not cooperating with them—this is where the productive part will be in actually creating something that has philosophical dignity, but also a kind of productive trajectory for the machines to go.

I feel like we're still in this first phase of developing AI, because when you look at it historically, we haven't really moved from the conceptual and philosophical premises that were established in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s for this technology. We have now gotten the technology that caught up to the ideas from the 60s, but we're still stuck in the same conceptual space.

Ross Dawson: Yeah, very much so. And, you know, of course, what is AGI, which everyone talks about, is basically—the only way in which people seem to be able to frame it is as relative to humans, which is the only reference point we have. I mean, there's, of course, animal intelligence, but that's because of that. It is, again, that lack of imagination—saying, "Well, intelligence, oh, intelligence is what humans do, so let's do something which is the same as that," whereas there's so much white space in what intelligence could be.

I think this almost comes back to definition. When people say intelligence, the word, when they use the word intelligence, they are referring to what humans do. It's not a general term, and so it all becomes a language problem as well, because we are so rooted to relating our language to human capabilities, as opposed to a more general potential.

Nina Begus: Yes, I think you're really on to something here, because I can see it also—because I work with animal communication researchers, and we're finding things there that we didn't find because we limited ourselves to thinking language is just a human production, that it needs a human subject. Now, as soon as we got rid of this presumption, we're finding new things, things that are basically parallel to what we do in our language.

So language is in a space of tension because it's being attacked both from the animal side and from the machinic side, which is why I really focused on language in this book. It's not a coincidence that we centered artificial intelligence in language as the interface, because this is how we relate to the world—this is our interface to talk to each other, to understand each other.

I think the fact that language is coming under such pressure as an interface brings with it a lot of other concepts that are being challenged. Are only humans creative? Is there a natural creativity, machinic creativity? Is there a different kind of intelligence that's maybe solely biological, embodied? How do we think about cognition? How do we think about culture? In AI and in the natural world, there's so much that comes with it: agency, autonomy, freedom, community, which I think we will be grappling with for the next few decades, at least.

Ross Dawson: I think you alluded before to the potential for AI to have its own languages. 

Nina Begus: I'ts happening already. The reason why I like Stanislaw Lem so much is because he can actually think about a machine—back in the 1970s, he's doing that—about a machine that's not human-like, that's not limited to human language. It is trained on human language, but then it goes its own way, where the human linguistic ceiling just cannot go anymore.

We're already seeing that in the models, in Berkeley's Biological Artificial Intelligence Lab, in the models that are not large language models, but generative adversarial networks that are based on speech. We see that as they are learning the words, they are encoding some information into silences that we don't know what it is.

I think what's really exciting to me are two things about language in machines. The first one is, what is this non-human production of language? We did not think that non-humans can produce language, even though we had parrots who had to crawl their way to us to speak in "humanese," to show that they have some kind of intelligence—even if it's just parroting, even if it's just what we call imitation, which some people consider not to be intelligence.

We've had these examples before, but now it's gotten nuclear—on this scale that LLMs are performing, it's really challenged a lot of our solely human attributes: creativity, storytelling. A lot of journalists come to me because there's this existential fear of machines taking over their work and so on. So we've been thinking about those things, and now it's actually happening.

Ross Dawson: One of the other key points here, I think, is that humanity is—the arts—there's so much, as you mentioned, in terms of fiction, in terms of films, in terms of visual arts, and many other artistic domains. We have reference points that we use, and the amount which people refer to the movie Her in the last years is pretty extraordinary, partly because it's obviously coming very much true. I think the Ex Machina story is very interesting as well, as are many others in the past.

But there is also this act of imagination. There are people who have written these books, who have crafted these films, who have created these things, and they are the ones who have been not just manifesting our human psyche, but also pushing that out and coming up with ideas which others haven't had, to give us something. So one thing we can certainly do is mine and dig into what has been created. But is there a way to interface through this to this act of imagining, which can give us new artifacts and ways of thinking and ways of relating?

Nina Begus: Yes, I think imagination and humanities in general are going to become more and more important, because AI will do a lot of technical work, but imaginaries—this is what we really excel at. It's actually interesting to see how you think fiction is this unbounded landscape where you can imagine anything, and yet it's really hard to find examples of machines that are beyond the human.

Even these writers, like the screenwriters for Her and Ex Machina, create these completely Pygmalion-esque films, where you have an artificial woman leading a relationship with a human man, and so on. For the whole film, you have her act as a human-like entity. But then at the end of each of those films—well, particularly in Her—Spike Jonze really tried to break out of this and show her AI side. Basically, there was no language to describe it, so he resorted to a metaphor—the metaphor of a book, where Samantha, the operations assistant, explains that her world is falling apart, like the way words are floating further and further apart in a book. That's how she's able to describe it; that's the closest she gets.

And then in Ex Machina, Alex Garland really wanted to portray the world from the social robot Ava's perspective in a visual way. He wrote down a scene, but he said, "I failed to execute it visually. I just couldn't do it well." So instead, he gave us a different scene that's shot from afar, where Ava embarks onto a helicopter and she has to undergo her Turing test—the helicopter pilot cannot recognize her as a robot; he needs to think she's a human woman.

There have been attempts, I think even in Garland's next film Annihilation, they're trying to set the grounds for something that's entirely new and hard to imagine. I think a big takeaway for us is this is very hard to do.

Ross Dawson: Yes, well, given that context, I do want to—as in the human plus AI framing—given all of this, what is it that we can do or should be doing in order to amplify our humanity, our capabilities, the positive aspects of what it is to be human? How can we relate to or use AI in order to amplify the best of us?

Nina Begus: Yeah, I actually had, while I was writing the book Artificial Humanities, this other dream project to work with writers—professional writers, creatives, people who live in a world of words—to see what they make of AI. I waited a little bit for the public's polarized reactions to calm down a bit and gathered 16 writers, some of whom already made a space for themselves in the field, like Sheila Heti and Ken Liu and Ted Chiang, and then some of the more junior writers who I knew were thinking about that—a Netflix screenwriter, and so on.

I gathered them to see—I think the creative people are really the answer here—I gathered them to see how they approach this very human part of the new human and AI collaboration zone. What was common across a lot of essays that are coming out in October under the title "First Encounters with AI" is this argument that, well, AI doesn't have subjectivity, it doesn't have emotions, it doesn't have a body, it doesn't have experience, it doesn't have meaning—all of these things that really make us human, all of these parts that actually make art compelling and literature compelling.

So Ken Liu's argument, for example, was, let's leave machines what they're good at—they're good at imitating and copying—and we're good at interpreting, we're good at creating and imagining. I think this is really a way to go with this. This catastrophizing that's very present in the public discourse, I think, is a bit misleading. I wish we had a more nuanced approach to what's actually happening, particularly in the space of writing.

Obviously, AI is a groundbreaking technology that affects pretty much every one of us and all the sectors, but when it comes to writing, we just don't think it's killable. We think that there's this perennial impulse that humans have to play with language, and that is not going to go away with AI. We're just going to amplify it through AI, through this new possibility that has now opened in many ways.

I like to think about AI as—you know, we've figured out how to fly. As soon as we figured out the physics of flight, we had planes and helicopters and drones and kites, and these are the new possibilities for human activities. In the same way, we figured out the machine learning principles, and now we have large language models and diffusion models, and we have GANs and so on, and there will be more. These are the new spaces of possibility that have opened for our activities, for our spirit to work on, but they do not replace the human in a meaningful way. It's more about extension than it is about automation.

Ross Dawson: Yeah, that's a wonderful way of framing it. So where can people go to find out more about your work?

Nina Begus: I have a pretty populated website with my name, ninabegus.com, where I write about my books, I write about my public work. I have videos on there, podcasts, links, and so on. I also have a pretty lively lab with a lot of collaborators and students, where a lot of what I imagined when writing Artificial Humanities—where a lot of collaborative projects happen. We have artists, we have engineers, we have philosophers that work on the same question, but come at it from very different backgrounds and with very different skills. I think this is becoming more and more important in the world of AI.

Ross Dawson: Yes, yes, bringing all of those disciplines and frames and thinking together. That's wonderful. I love what you're doing—very important. I hope the messages ripple through, and obviously wonderful to be able to share this with the Humans Plus AI audience. Thank you so much.

Nina Begus: Thank you, Ross, and thank you all for listening.

The post Nina Begus on artificial humanities, AI archetypes, limiting and productive metaphors, and human extension (HAI Ep38) appeared first on Humans + AI.

"The center of any change that we're doing in the fourth industrial revolution is always the human being, because humans have an ability to adopt, adapt to skills, and adjust to an environment."

–Henrik von Scheel

Henrik von Scheel is Co-Founder of advisory firm Strategic Intelligence, Chairman of the Climate Asset Trust, Vice Chairman of Regulatory Intelligence Committee, and Professor of Strategy, Arthur Lok Jack School of Business, among other roles. He is best known as originator of Industry 4.0, with many awards and extensive global recognition of his work.

Website:

von-scheel.com

LinkedIn Profile:

Henrik von Scheel

Ross Dawson: Henrik, it is wonderful to have you on the show.

Henrik von Scheel: Thank you very much for having me, Ross.

Ross Dawson: So I think we're pretty aligned in believing that we need to approach AI from a human-centered perspective and how it can bring us prosperity. So I'd just love to start with, how do you think about how we should be thinking about AI?

Henrik von Scheel: Well, I think, like every technology that comes into play, it brings a lot of changes to us. But I think the center of any change that we're doing in the fourth industrial revolution is always the human being, because humans have an ability to adapt, adapt to skills, and adjust to an environment. So technology is something that we apply, but it's the strategy on how we adapt with it that makes a difference. It's never the technology itself.

So I'm excited. It's one of the most exciting periods for the industry and for us as people.

Ross Dawson: There's a phrase which I've heard you say more than once around AI should make us smarter, healthier, and wealthier. So if that's the case, how do we frame it? How do we start to get on that journey?

Henrik von Scheel: So I think what people experience today in AI is that they experience a lot of media hype—large language models, ChatGPT, and all of this—and they consume it from the media. So there's a big hype around it, and I believe that AI is about to crash fundamentally, but crashing in technology is not bad, right? There are a lot of promises and then an inability to deliver, and then it crashes. What you hear in the media today is very much driven by a story of them raising funds because it's so expensive, and so they are promising the world of everything and nothing, and the reality looks a little bit better.

The world that they are presenting is that you will be replaced, and you will be happy, and you'll be served by everything else. And somehow it will work out. We don't know how, but it will work out. And that's not a future that is really a real future.

The future must include that everybody gets smarter, wealthier, and healthier. And when I say everybody, I mean not only the guys that have money, that they become more rich, or the middle class. It's like everybody in society should get smarter from AI. That means part of the things that they need to learn or how human evolution works should be better, and it should make us healthier people and wealthier people.

So it should not only be that we sacrifice our convenience with our freedom, with our privacy, with our environment, or any other things that we put on the table to get convenience back. That exchange we have done a couple of times, and it's not working really well for humans, and it's not a good trade for us, right?

Ross Dawson: Yeah, I love that. And since it's quite simple, you know, you can say it, it's clear, it sounds good, and it is a really clear direction. But you're actually pointing in a couple of ways there to capital allocation. So obviously, if you're looking at the AI economic story, this is around this diversion of capital from other places to AI model development, data centers, deployment, and so on. But also, when you're saying wealth here, this is around the distribution of wealth—where we're allocating capital to AI development, but also from the way in which AI is developed, there will be creation of wealth. There is the real potential for productivity improvement.

But then it's about finding, how do we have the mechanisms for allocation of wealth or capital from that which is allocated? Let's call it equitably.

Henrik von Scheel: I'm a firm believer that this year, 35 to 45% of the money invested in AI will evaporate. Companies that have invested—they're the early adopters—they have this format, so they're rushing to it. From a company perspective, you always adapt the best practices. When it goes beyond the hype, and the performance curve and adoption curve is low. For example, for AI, the simple version is there. You heard that Deloitte and McKinsey talked 10 years ago about robotic process automation like God's gift to mankind in AI. Today, you don't hear them talking about it, because you can download it for free—for HR, for forecasting, planning, budgeting, and so on, you can save 20 or 30%, and as an organization, you can do it yourself. You download two, three models, you test it, and you run it. Good, okay, so that's when you apply best practices.

Then you have industry practices, like AI agents. So when you have AI agents for manufacturing, for industrial sectors, for energy sectors, they are nothing else than workflow optimization. You use robotic process optimization, you do a visualization on it, so it's far more practical at a level, because you use the data they already have in the organizations under a simple line on the process flow, on the safety, security—it's very much down at the level where they can apply it and use it. So this version of large language models, where you have this magic powder you spread over the organization and it's totally working—it's not really there.

And then there's the third leg that companies are quite aware of. It's called Shadow AI, right? Shadow AI is because AI is the biggest infringement on intellectual capital within organizations. The reason why normal people are not allowed to look at pornography at their work is because of cybersecurity. It's not that your boss doesn't like you to look at pornography; it's because of cybersecurity. It's the same reason with AI—you should not be allowed to use Copilot latest version or large language models as a CFO or as a worker, because you're exporting your own information outside. Copilot takes, every five seconds, a screenshot for the large language models' learning. So as a corporate point of view, that's the first thing—you should actually protect your own data so you can monetize your data in the future.

From an economic point of view, if you go two, three steps behind this, you ask, okay, what is it that makes sense in this? There's something really, really strange in this. Australia was built by building railways—they take 100 years to build, they also last 100 years. The infrastructure that lasts. So there's a return on investment. You build streets, you build education systems—everything we build as humans, as society, has a lasting element to it. Now, we build data centers that last three months until the chips need to be returned, or six months. So there's no sense in that we are building data centers around the world where we capture all data. It has a volume of hundreds of trillions of dollars, and we need to exchange them at a rate between three to six months to maintain the data. And then you say, wow. And you do that via license models of large language models—the data can never, in its entire life cycle, be that much worth.

So there's a very strange element, because most of the entrepreneurs that go to large language models and use their solutions on Gemini and ChatGPT and so on, you say, okay, you are building your solution on large language models, but you don't own the model. You don't own the data. You don't own your own data. So what are you doing?

Ross Dawson: You have architectural choices, to a point, as to—

Henrik von Scheel: That's Architectural choices, but you are limiting yourself. So the first element you always say, if my value is customizing a solution, your value is actually the data. So you must have a way to keep and maintain the data yourself. We can take another call to say how you apply AI and what the future of AI looks like, because AI today is very much focused on language models, and language models are the most limited version of AI science of all. It has the least data, but it's the one we're most excited about, because it resembles something we do—our wording, our formation of words. It's a recognition. Recognitions are what we do.

I wanted to come back to this about the economy, right? The US economy puts all chips on this. It's highly energy sensitive, and it's working all railroads. However, the US dollar is on a really, really bad track record. Three and a half years ago, there was a president in the US—he was sleeping—and meanwhile, he was sleeping, Saudi Arabia's King MBS went in and he did a divorce, which is called the divorce of the petrodollar. So the gold linked with US dollar linked with oil—that was the solution. The US had that anybody, they could print as much money as they wanted, and the rest of the world was paying the dividend for it. It was the only country that could just print money. That brought the US into a mode, and when the new president came into his office, it's very rare that in the US, you are writing an accord. An accord is only written when the Federal Reserve goes into the president's office saying, guys, we're hitting the wall. We need to do something. And they wrote five plans, what they wanted to do. And here's the funny thing—when I mention them, you will recognize them very much.

Number one, bring back manufacturing. Number two, implement tariffs so they can pull back US dollars. Number three, then they wanted to implement stable coins to pull back US dollars. I forgot number three, actually. Number four, and number five was actually they want to go to war. Now they go to war, right? So they are going to war, not because of any reasons besides their economy is based on a war machine, and the economy is becoming unstable. So that's one of the main reasons. The US has put all cards on AI—all their economy cards are on AI. And that's, from a country perspective, a very dangerous thing to do because you need energy and you need data, and AI from the US perspective has become a defense mechanism.

When you look at the regulatory aspect of AI, Europe is very much put into human and center, and that the human owns the data, protects teenagers up to 16 years old, and that you can work as an entrepreneur with data, but you have to coordinate how you protect and manage the data. You have to be transparent on how you use the data and how much data you use. The US is very different—red tape off, no regulations at all, full-blown power to the market, and you are seen as a consumer, Ross, so all power to the guys who earn money to make more money. So no protections of anything, of your data—that's the US version and literally, no regulations, no redtape regulations.

Ross Dawson: In a moment, I want to move on to the human-AI collaboration. But just to round this out, you said before about your prediction that 35 to 40% of the investment in AI is gone, which I think is very, very fair. So back when we both were speakers at the Future of Sex Summit in Dubai last year, I was on a panel where I was asked, is it boom or bust? And basically both, in the sense of 35–40%—that's bust. But at the same time, there are other parts of the market which can prosper. Of course, consolidation of the market means that there's massive investments and in some cases massive losses, but there still are sectors where high value can be created. But this goes back to your point where still a lot of the center is in the US. We are starting to see sovereign AI initiatives and other initiatives around the world, but those are often open source foundation models. And obviously the regulation, particularly around the EU, provides a still very differentiated AI landscape with US, China, EU, and then some other players as well, where if we see boom and bust, that could be very much focused on the US, with potential for other parts of the world to see more growth in AI.

Henrik von Scheel: So Ross, you're using large language models, right?

Ross Dawson: Yes.

Henrik von Scheel: Do you have the feeling that they, since last year, are getting stronger or weaker? they're getting weaker?

Ross Dawson: They're getting better.

Henrik von Scheel: My feeling is the opposite. My feeling is that they're getting weaker and weaker, and that's because part of the data —

Ross Dawson: In which content?

Henrik von Scheel: They're using old, old content. They've already used old content. So now you need to go to specialized, you need to go to public sources, to go for research data, you know. But from a content-wise perspective, it becomes extremely weak. I mean, last year, I'm extremely disappointed by large language models—very, very disappointed in terms of what they can deliver and what they do. Ask it whatever—ask it about futurism prediction, or ask about Industry 5.0, 5.6, whatever answer you give it, you can get an answer. You know, 110%—like CPAM, there are 19 regulations on CPAM, and you ask, how many regulations are there? They will give you sometimes 19, sometimes 17, sometimes 23—they just make up stuff. It just gets worse and worse. So if the valid data is not strong enough, it becomes actually a very, very weak tool after all, right?

Ross Dawson: So are these using the top models from the frontier labs, because they are very good.

Henrik von Scheel: Yeah, but then you have to have the paid model. But it's not like I'm really, really impressed by it. It's not kicking my bum where it says, holy smokes. In the beginning, the first two years, you were surprised, right? So I have a little bit of the feeling that AI today is a little bit where emails were in the beginning, and then digitalization came. With emails, we were all excited, but emails just created not less workload, but more workload for us—it decreased our productivity. There are really good signs of this.

Then you look at digitalization, right? We were all excited because we can connect, we can talk to our friends, all of this. But what ended up with WhatsApp Business? WhatsApp Business is no business, right? We are using it, but it decreases our productivity level far more. So today, with digitalization, we are becoming generalists—quick information, we know something, but we don't know anything, right? It's not that you would put the finger on it and say, well, it has really increased our innovation level. No. Has it really increased our research level? No. Has it really made us better human beings? No. So I'm not negative against it. I'm just saying we have to be careful, because we have a knife or a hammer—we shouldn't use the hammer for everything. And you mentioned that really well, right? AI's hype cycle is, with any technology, there's a hype, and then it goes down and matures, and then the application of this is different than what you thought in the beginning, of course, but that's AI—it's very much relevant. But you know, the big message today in AI is AI physical, right? What is AI physical?

Ross Dawson: Well, just going back to the point—a lot of what I'm working on at the moment is the idea of appropriate trust. So you trust the models enough, but not too much, so that if they are going to give you bad results, you're not relying on them. But if they are useful, you can use them. So we have to continue to calibrate for any particular model, which is different in every particular context. This is both essentially a skill or a capability, where we need to know when and how to use models at any particular time, because they're changing in whatever way. So that becomes a foundation of how we can trust them to the right degree—not too much, but enough that we can actually use them if they are useful. Which comes back to this frame of the human-AI collaboration, which you've been doing a lot of work on. So if AI can be useful in some contexts, how is it that we can best build effective human-AI collaboration?

Henrik von Scheel: I like this. Let's play a little bit, right? So if human evolution is evolving with the birth certificate, we go to kindergarten, we go to school, and we learn differently. Everybody's individual—we learn differently, right? It takes humans a long time to learn, to sense, to do all of this. And then you have AI, which is a supporting learning model for you to store information. But today you learn, and the model learns on you. You log in, and every time you learn, the model learns from you. That means that all your information is captured there, right? So the next evolution of a model should be that the privacy of Ross is throughout your last five years with large language models—you've studied Porter's models, you've studied this and this. Well, if I ask you next day about Porter's model, you still forget it, but the machine should be able to help you to learn, to adopt the skills in your daily life. So it cannot be a machine knowledge learning that is owned somewhere else by a big company—it must be something that is attached to Ross throughout your life, that you go from where you are now, and in five years, you're somewhere else. So the knowledge that you have searched and gained and adopted, it follows your life, right?

This is, for me, AI—the real AI revolution happens in the bio revolution in 2030, because the biggest amount of data we have is biophysical data. So the interconnection between our body, the modules, the biosystem modules, the biophysical systems, how we eat food, how material, with their level, is coming all in there, and part of this is the knowledge center of you, Ross. So if you learn something, how does it follow your evolution? Do you learn the same way today you learned 10 years ago?

Ross Dawson: And it's a wonderful thing that we continue to learn and forget and evolve. We are the same person, sort of, but, you know, we are a different person at the same time.

Henrik von Scheel: I was talking yesterday to a psychiatrist who's studying human evolution, and she's called Trina Gondo, and I had this interesting discussion with her, because she says humans' learning capacity changes throughout their life. So if we have learning modules that can support us throughout our life—to go through how conscious, how focused we are on things, how much stress level we can take, because stress levels are also different, how much breadth are you covering in terms of your work, your private life, how are you in terms of setup, in terms of your spiritual life—all of this has something to do with your learning, because it's your perspective you drive. It's your values you drive.

I actually developed with her a model in terms of how the six aggregates of the brain work to understand our human evolution. For the last eight months, I'm trying to map human evolution, to map it to what AI—how it affects it, what we should regulate and how we should protect it, and how the human can monetize its own data, right? So just look at—

Ross Dawson: The initiative by Doc Searls. So there's a couple of really interesting initiatives. This is one where he worked originally on VRM, the vendor relationship management—you own your own data and trade that as effective—and is now building, or being instrumental in setting up, an AI initiative where it is around your personal AI, so you own the data, you own the systems, and you're able to evolve with it. There are some other interesting initiatives like this, but these are obviously very tiny compared with the ways in which most people are using—essentially giving off their data to other people. But this is certainly part of the potential, to build the structures and architectures where we do own our data and our models and how they are used and what comes from them.

Henrik von Scheel: So let's go back into one element, right? Originally, Ross, you and everybody else of us who live in a society, we made an agreement with the government—a social agreement. And the social agreement is, I'm using, you're protecting me, and I'm willing to pay tax somehow, right? So in reality, the government you made an agreement with should have the ability to protect you. However, in an AI model today, it's not possible, because if they should protect you from the very beginning and keep the store of your data and maintain your data, the amount of money they need just to maintain your data is immense.

So we need to define and find a model with governments where governments and the human being can, in co-ownership, hold the data structure—like in a blockchain, that you have a public and a private key, and both can hold the data, but the data is only unlocked both ways. Why? Because there's a monetization model on your own data throughout your life. And when you die, your data goes on to your children, because that's your DNA data, that's your history life data, that's all of it. So there should be an ability to monetize it.

The challenge we face with this is the amount it will cost to maintain your data throughout your life, and we need to find—in the fourth industrial revolution, we're going through the bio revolution, then we're going to the consumer revolution, and then we go to the fusion revolution. And in the fusion revolution, the objective and the hope is that we are finding mechanisms to have cheap energy, because the amount of energy we use today in terms of data is literally crazy. It's utterly, utterly crazy. We should be ashamed of ourselves if we see that, and that's just for the amount of convenience.

So if we find a model for our government to do this, we should actually work on this. This is what I'm trying to look at. I want to alert you to one interesting thing. My key field of study is patternicity with probabilities. So when you look at trends that are coming, you look at probabilities—not ChatGPT stuff, right? When you look at this, there's one trend that emerged last week that hasn't been emerging before—the trend of anarchy in Europe. Anarchy is an interesting aspect, because anarchy is your distrust in the government. And when anarchy comes, it's just an equation of 25%. If 25% in a country like Germany or UK or France will take it, 25% is a flipping chart for everybody, because the petrol prices are too high, expenses for food are too high, they get too many promises they never—and then take the power in their own hand.

When you look at it a little bit, you say, but anarchy—is that something new? No, the US is living in anarchy today. Trump is the true version of anarchy. They distrust the government, and they choose him, and he, from all aspects, says, okay, I'm doing something very different. I give all the power to the market. There's been no time in history where all the power is residing within the market—Elon Musk and Amazon, Apple, all of them have literally all the power. It's totally, utterly crazy. This is the highest version of anarchy you can see in a country. And if we're not careful, it's spreading.

Why am I discussing this in an AI human element? Because if the human is the centerpiece, what is the core element of human development? It's that we have safety, security, and trust. If trust is broken, anarchy emerges. So if anarchy emerges, AI can take on very different versions that we don't want in a scenario thinking, but AI can also take on the version that it can support us in our evolution.

Ross Dawson: Well, just going to that—education. You are a professor. You are an educator. You look at the future of education, and you alluded to that before. So in this world where AI is already and is becoming more significant, how do we reinvent education? How do we educate ourselves as individuals, as educational institutions, or society? How do we shape the education that we need for the exciting coming times?

Henrik von Scheel: I think one of our challenges with education is that we as people, when we go beyond eight years old, the key element we're learning is reasoning, and our reasoning skills are learned by doing mistakes, unfortunately. We never learn by getting an answer. If you study Porter's model on ChatGPT, and you get all the answers from Porter's model, and I ask you the next day, if you haven't applied it, you haven't learned it. If I would ask you, you will learn it. You do mistakes, and it's by doing the mistakes, by putting yourself into the content, working with the content, and doing mistakes, you learn. Unfortunately, most of the stuff we learn today—now, human evolution in reasoning is by doing mistakes. So we need to find a very smart way how AI can support us in this mistake learning phase, because it's the way that we are built to learn, right?

Ross Dawson: And I think that's a critical thing—where as individuals, we need to understand that if we delegate our thinking to AI, it's not going to work; you're going to be dumber rather than smarter. But if we can have the intent of using it to hone our thinking and helping us to make mistakes or be a Socratic dialog or whatever, we can do that, but that requires the individual intent. So again, we also need to frame as educators and also in organizations—which should be educational institutions in their own right, because they are learning organizations—it's this framing of the use of AI as a cognitive foil for us, as opposed to something where we delegate our work, which is never going to get us anywhere good.

Henrik von Scheel: And where do you think we can use it in education?

Ross Dawson: The good thing is, you know, personalized education, where I think that there is definitely this ability to address where individuals are and their understanding, the metaphors that will be relevant to them, the frames for that. But it never has to be in a form of giving the answer. So there's always this complement of human—as in, the educator needs to be inspiring. They need to help the person to find themselves. They have that relationship with them. So it's this complement with the AI, which can guide to specific lessons or frames or examples that people resonate with, which can assist them. And so again, it needs to be very much—individuals need to understand, they have to shape it for themselves. I think we can present things in the right way. And there's very much a human plus AI educational frame.

Henrik von Scheel: I think you're spot on with this. When you look at the five aggregates that we have in human evolution and in education phases, our sensory—our forming of ourselves to the outside world—is shaped quite early on, until we are maybe 12 years old, but quite early, the first two years. That means our sight, our smell, how we hear, how we taste, how we feel, and how our balance works—we learn quite fast. This is what AI is focusing on in AI physical today. They're trying to come from a language model point of view outside to the physical world.

Then we have this cognitive version of us, which is the intellect version. It's very different. The intellect version of us is a version of awareness, a version of how we comprehend things, how we understand things, how our knowledge is conceived and given out. So it's both communications, it's storytelling, it's our comprehension, it's our perspective, it's our reasoning, it's our awareness. These four things are never the same for the same person. I can have a room of 200 students, I can talk about the same element on Adam Smith's first principle, and they will all understand it differently because of their different backgrounds. So this part of cognitive understanding, the intellect, is far more complex.

Then you go to the versions of who we are as a person. Our memories—our memories are a whole element of our emotions, which is a hugely important part of our learning, because memories have nothing to do with truth. Large language models always look for the truth, but in our own memories, we are lying to ourselves to keep our sanity. We are partly, not consciously but unconsciously, lying to ourselves because we view it only from one perspective. So our reflection of our memories or our impulses are related to our memories or our conceptual things. All these elements are our emotional elements, in terms of how strongly we can link to knowledge, how strongly we can see the future, how we can see ourselves in the future—all of this.

When you look at the crisis now, the memory is on how resilient we are as people, how resilient we are in our learning phase, how comfortable we are with the unknown, how comfortable we are to learning. Then you have the next two ones. The other one is our mental formation or our identity. This is the element we're trying to protect in digitalization—how we form our opinions, our insight, our resolution, our understanding, ourselves, and our retentiveness, who we are. All of these things are being shaped as teenagers. We don't want this to be in a social aspect. We want this to be a safe, secure element. So this is the identity you form.

Then you have the consciousness. The consciousness is a strange thing. You have two layers running in your education. You have the layers that are running long term and the unconsciousness that actually takes the decision—the analytical versions and the underlying elements. For example, why are you doing something? So you come with purposes, you come with energy, you come with desire, or you come with willpower. Then you say, well, they're more etheric. No, they're not. Because, Ross, you wake up every morning with that much amount of energy. You can use this the next eight hours you work. You can use it on emails the first four hours, but then you're using your most precious willpower and energy right then. You have your willpower to train, for example, if you want to do training. When you want to train in the evening, when your willpower is lower, you want to train early in the morning. So this willpower and the energy is what we as humans in our consciousness—how we are aware of things, what we focus on, we magnify. So these are the five aggregates you're using from the learning perspective.

If we apply these, you and I, Ross, we would go into an initiative to say, how can we apply this to understand human evolution when we evolve this? Because I'm nearly 60 years old now, and that means, for me, my concept of life, experience of life, is different than when I was 30, than when I was 20. You cannot go to a young person that is 15 years old and say, let me tell you about love—there are four different phases of love. They need to experience them themselves, because it's not my job to take that away from them. And it's not my job to tell a young man, now you want to conquer and do, you want to have freedom, Generation X and all of this. And then you realize, easy, easy, easy. I'll let you know. When you fall in love and you become a father, it changes you. Why does it change you? Because accountability moves into a man's focus area, as before he was conquering. And then accountability—a man wants to be a caretaker of something, and it fulfills and magnifies a man. And then you say, well, this is not part of the five aggregates—very much so, right? Because it's part of human evolution. Ross, you have experienced that in your life. So then you say, how do we connect that with our evolution and learning?

Ross Dawson: Yeah, no, I think that's a really important point around accountability for ourselves, for those around us, directly in the broader community. And I think that's kind of this big humans plus AI frame. So we're obviously just touching the surface of what we could dig into now. But how can people find out more about your work Henrik?

Henrik von Scheel: I'm a public figure. I'm doing a lot of research projects with universities. I have a lot of PhD students and coaching and supporting governments on policy initiatives. Currently, I'm focusing a lot in the Gulf regions on strategic briefings, on crisis management, in terms of doing scenarios for strategic, tactical, operational, for short term and long term. But my passion is actually teaching, and this is far more a personal story on teaching.

People see me always as the Industry 4.0 originator on everything I have accomplished. But my true story is actually quite different. When I was young, I was dyslexic. I'm actually double dyslexic, and I was stuttering. I had a very, very difficult time in school. That's why I am a little bit passive aggressive, because I'm always on the defensive, because many years I went through life just being some sort of an outcast. So within that phase, I had a very strong teacher that actually supported me and used time and effort to see my skills, and he helped me to overcome my dyslexia—which is not really true. You never overcome your dyslexia. You are just getting tools to work with it. So that means I've written today nine books, and five of them are bestsellers, but I cannot even read my own books aloud.

So what is the message I'm giving? Everybody of us is made different, and because we're made different, it's not that—because society is often built on, if you don't fit that frame, then you're not part of that frame. But I think AI opens up something for us—that the breadth of who we are as people is a beautiful thing. And because I cannot speak the same way, like I have a good friend Tarek, who is also your friend—he's a gifted storyteller. My gift is that I can see patterns. So I believe that every human being should be able to see their superpower. Your gift, Ross, is a very different gift. You can gather communities, you can convey difficult things in a simple thing, you have an ability to put the human in the future, where everybody sits today and they freak the hell out because they don't see them part of the future. So I think everybody has a future in that.

To answer your question, I'm a quite reachable person. I believe the future looks like a good future for us, Ross. I believe this is the time for our educators to wake up out of their long-term sleep. We need to evolve our teaching material. We need to evolve the way that we learn and teach. We have terrible lessons in terms of how boys and girls evolve in their learnings, and we're not doing anything about it. This is our chance with AI to change the learning mechanisms for boys and girls, our learning mechanisms if you're one like me that doesn't fit these templates, if you have special needs. We have the ability with AI to specialize ourselves far more in detail.

One of the challenges we have with education today—when you go from primary school to higher education, and then go beyond higher education—our challenge with higher education is we have become generalists, and our generalism is actually inhibiting us to innovate, so we're not meeting some of the core challenges that we have in science today, and we need to push the boundaries on where we go to research to really become innovative. We need to push our boundaries in terms of manufacturing, energy sector, and so on, to specialize in special fields. When you look at engineering schools, engineering schools have become more and more generalist in six fields, and they should become specialists in fields. So I think that's where we need to really push the boundaries.

Ross Dawson: Yeah, no, I think, to your point, what I see as one of the ultimate possibilities from AI is that it amplifies our individuality. And so that's an extraordinary possibility. So thank you so much for your time and your insights, Henrik. You're sharing some great work, and we'll share in the show notes links to one of your research papers and the work you do. Thank you.

Henrik von Scheel: Okay, thanks a lot. Good. Goodbye.

The post Henrik von Scheel on making people smarter, wealthier and healthier, biophysical data, resilient learning, and human evolution (HAI Ep37) appeared first on Humans + AI.

"Determining accountability, the ability to intervene, the time to intervention, the time to stop, pause, change, alter—there are so many different layers that need to be thought through."

–Joanna Michalska

Dr Joanna Michalska is Founder of Ethica Group Ltd., Co-Founder of The Strategic Centre, and an advisor to boards on AI risk, ethics, and governance. She holds a PhD in Strategic Enterprise Risk Management and has twenty years’ experience leading enterprise risk, strategy and transformation at J.P. Morgan and HSBC.

Website:

ethicagroup.ai

LinkedIn Profile:

Dr Joanna Michalska

Ross Dawson: Joanna, it's a delight to have you on the show.

Joanna Michalska: Well, thank you for having me, Ross.

Ross Dawson: So, AI is wonderful, but it also brings us into a whole lot of new territory where we have to be careful in various ways. I'd love to just hear, first of all, the big framing around how boards and executive teams need to be thinking about governance and accountability as AI is incorporated more and more into work and organizations.

Joanna Michalska: I think we're all very excited about the capability that exists today to help us enhance our performance and the way we think about strategic execution for our organizations. It has multidimensional consequences for how we adapt it. What's very important right now is, as executives and boards think about accelerating their ambitions and growth plans, there needs to be awareness of two components.

First, how do we as leaders, as humans, need to adapt to that new environment? There are new conditions, or perhaps existing conditions that really need to be enhanced. They're very important to exist in order to be able to adapt and to scale. Second, do we actually have the right systems in place to enable that scale?

I think it's important to recognize that, yes, governance has always existed, but the way it existed was more as external supporting scaffolding, rather than being built into an organizational ecosystem. We also need to have the right leadership in place to ensure that decisions are made in the right way and the organization is designed in a much more robust, agile way. These two conditions are critical for not only increasing adoption, but also doing so in a safe and responsible way, especially as we expand our ambitions for the future. It's exciting, but there's also a lot of caution and a lot of questions being asked by executives at this time.

Ross Dawson: Yes and I guess the more we can address those concerns upfront, the more it enables us to do. I have this idea of minimum viable governance—at least having some governance in place so we don't go too badly astray. But I always think of governance for transformation as: how do you set governance not as a brake to slow you, but in fact to accelerate you, because you have confidence in how you're going about it?

Joanna Michalska: Absolutely! I think the mindset shift is very important, because governance, to your point, has always been seen as a compliance-driven thing that we must do because regulators require us to, and we need to demonstrate we have these policies and procedures in place and the right people in the right positions. Now, what the new environment is requiring of us—as executives, even board members—is a different set of responsibilities that really cannot be assumed as pre-existing.

In this accelerated environment—let's call it that, rather than just "AI," because it's so overused and can mean so many different things—where the automation rate is fast and overtaking everything, governance needs to change. It can't be an afterthought or something we designed at one point in the past and now just try to fit into what's happening. It really needs to become a well-designed, living organism. It needs to organically evolve. It needs to have the right people with the right accountability that is well understood. Accountability that was designed in the past needs to be looked at, discussed, and understood by all executives and across the organization, cross-functionally, to really work.

Another important thing is to make sure executives have the right level of ownership and responsibility to ensure the conditions exist to enable that system to work. That's a very difficult thing to do, because now you're talking about having designed human oversight that doesn't just become a "human in the loop," but the right human in the right loop. By "right," I mean: does this person, or these people, understand exactly what the output of the automated system is? How has this decision been made? Is there the right level of executive oversight when that decision is already made? How confident are we that we can say, with a level of certainty, "I'm comfortable with this, and this is not going to create negative consequences I'm not willing to accept"? That's not an easy thing to do—to create those conditions of trust and safety.

Ross Dawson: Particularly when there are so many decisions and outputs throughout the organization. Let's go into decision making. I've built a little framework around going from humans-only through to AI-only decisions. Hopefully, there are no purely human decisions anymore; at least you can ask an AI, "Am I crazy or not?" even if it's a human decision. Some decisions are already fully automated, but they still need oversight.

You can bring in exceptions, conditional things, humans in the loop for approval, humans in the process, or build an explainability layer. There's a whole array of different things. For every decision, you need to create the right way to implement it. In an organization with that profusion of different decisions and possible approaches, how can you actually make that happen?

Joanna Michalska: Yeah, it's a great question. Decisions are at the center of everything, and the quality of those decisions—and the whole architecture, how it's designed for decisions to be made—is really important. It doesn't stay static; it evolves as the organizational structure evolves. Questions like accountability—what does it look like, and what is the governance around accountability—are critical.

Intervention capability is also very important, because with this level of automation, the whole design of how automated decisions are made raises multiple questions. Are these decisions made by old algorithms that are very simple, where the risk is determined by a set of rules? Is there clarity around who actually has the decision intervention rights in the organization, and how does that roll up to an executive layer?

Determining accountability, the ability to intervene, the time to intervention, the time to stop, pause, change, alter—there are so many different layers that need to be thought through. The quality of human decision-making, and determining when a human is able to review decisions made by complex systems—whether agentic or whatever structure the organization has—is critical at any level, whether it's middle management, executive management, or board. There are different layers of how the architecture requires design and measurement.

Escalation pathways are another one. People will not naturally escalate if they fear negative consequences, retaliation, or any type of fear created because there isn't psychological safety or trust within the organization. Even if there is an escalation protocol in place within the decision architecture, how do we know that people will raise the problem?

Ross Dawson: The accountability. Of course, only humans are accountable. Ultimately, the board and their executives are accountable. But what you're suggesting, it sounds like, is that for every decision, there is somebody where you can say, "That person is accountable." Obviously, it cascades up to who they're reporting to, but there is human accountability for every decision made, even if it's a thousand decisions where somebody has oversight and responsibility that those are the right decisions.

I want to talk about escalation and how that might happen, but perhaps we can ground this with a couple of examples. What are some examples of decisions made in organizations—hopefully well-designed, or perhaps not so well-designed and haven't worked out?

Joanna Michalska: Yes, I have a couple of good examples where an automated system allows review of multiple false positives, where a human would spend months or weeks looking at exceptions. From an optimization perspective, that's really valuable. For example, in fraud detection or sanction screening, you can design a process where your algorithm applies rules very quickly with specific risk tiering. You know which decisions need an additional level of checks—let's say, automated checks. With a confidence of over 90%, your queue for checking and looking at exceptions—what would otherwise have to be done by a human—is not really necessary; it's done by the algorithm.

In terms of decisioning, from a human oversight perspective, you're really looking at things that are very high risk and require additional human review, or exceptions to the usual flow that break the rule designed for the algorithm to execute. Then, somebody picks it up and looks at it. These are powerful examples where there's potentially a high human risk of misinterpreting something, but if the algorithm is designed appropriately and has the right governance in place, it can really speed things up and make space for a human who otherwise would be involved in that process to actually develop and do something different.

In the example I'm talking about, we've focused on retraining people to expand their roles and do something else, rather than just being involved in checking decisions or reviewing boring exceptions that were really false positives.

Ross Dawson: What's another different example?

Joanna Michalska: Fraud detection is another really good one where—

Ross Dawson: Because one of the things about fraud detection is there is an answer—as in, it is fraud or it isn't fraud. You can get false positives and false negatives, but that's kind of reductionist. There's a whole array of decisions where you can't necessarily say before the fact whether it's a good decision or not. It's interesting to look at these very different types of decisions, not just ones that can be very algorithmic because they're data-based and there is a true or false. Many decisions don't fit those parameters.

Joanna Michalska: No, that's very true. Actually, what I've seen, especially recently, is that there are a lot of questions being asked by the board or executives when they get to the point where a decision isn't easy or clear. They look at sets of metrics that do not make a lot of sense, and then the question becomes, "Who can explain to me how this decision was made, that this metric shows me X? Who in the organization can I go to, and how quickly, for them to explain that to me?" In my experience, especially recently, that's a very difficult and uncomfortable question to ask and answer, because it's not clear—especially when it comes to things that don't have a clear accountability pathway, because more than one person is accountable. So the question is, is this a Risk Officer question, or is it a Data Officer, CTO, CSO—who actually is responsible?

In these instances, it's particularly important to have the right accountability that is understood at that level—who is accountable for what part of the process? It's not easy, because it is quite complex and creates a lot of challenging discussions. Very often, it depends on the organizational maturity and the level of AI adoption. What systems do we have? Do we understand what is an AI system in the first place? That part is not easy, it's complicated, and it creates quite a lot of challenging discussions.

Ross Dawson: Well, it is difficult and complicated and challenging, but that's not very useful. Let's map the pathway. Give me a roadmap for an organization: we're going to assess our decisions, rank them in order of priority or risk or uncertainty, apply AI, and put accountability in place for all of these. This might take us sixteen years, but we're going to start somewhere else.

Joanna Michalska: I think a really good example is a new European EU AI Act, where there is a very clear starting point and clear requirements. For many organizations, that's step one: what are we actually required by regulators to do? We look at what processes, systems, and outcomes we've got. That's step one. Then, we look at which of our applications are actually what risk, and we tier them. We assign the right executives for the right processes. First, we identify where we are today, then work with our compliance or risk officers to understand where we think we are versus where we are according to the regulation.

That regulation—the high-risk identification of those systems—is going live in August this year, so it's a very pressured point for people to address. Once that's done, there's a clear inventory of the current state, a clear inventory of where we need to be, gap identification for which high-risk systems require transformation and to what extent, and then the right people need to be in the right places so the transformation roadmap is defined. There's accountability for that transformation to occur, but often a lot of external advisors are invited to help. In that case, my work usually starts with an exposure review, where I speak to everyone accountable and get a view of where the organization is, maturity-wise, versus where it needs to be for the implementation deadline.

Then, there's a very clear prioritization roadmap: what's the impact and consequences for these processes or systems not to comply, and what are the next steps for compliance? Who needs to be in the process? What metrics need to exist? What's the gap to the right level of maturity to demonstrate that we are compliant and can confidently talk to regulators, our organization, stakeholders, whoever, to demonstrate, "Here's where we were or thought we were, these are the steps we're taking, these are the people who are accountable, these are the decisions we're going to make, and we're going to demonstrate that we've taken them this way." That's how we design our journey.

All of this sounds very simple, but the initial assessment is always very complicated, because everyone goes through the process and, in what I call a deep dive into documentation and governance structures, very often the outcomes show governance is not mature. It often needs to change—even the level of metrics, the maturity of the metrics thresholds in place is very immature and very legacy. Ultimately, it applies to the old world, but not to the new world.

Ross Dawson: Well, every organization needs to evolve, and potentially rapidly. Do you look at strategic decisions, or the role of AI in strategic decisions, or other very complex, high-level decisions?

Joanna Michalska: Yes, and it's interesting to see that there is, what I would call, a cognitive dissonance between where people would like to apply AI for strategic decisions versus the reality. AI is actually used much more for operationalization or speeding up optimization—very performative. How can we quickly improve performance? There's a lot of discussion about it, and I see that people want to think about it, especially as boards are putting a lot of pressure to improve strategic ambition and create a competitive advantage, which is well beyond just regulatory compliance. But it's not very mature—let's just put it that way. It's much more integrated within improving operational performance — let's just say that.

Ross Dawson: Yeah, well, we might loop back to that. Part of your background is neuroscience, and we've been talking a lot about decision making. There's been a lot of wonderful work over the last seven or eight decades on the role of human cognition in decision making. Tell me about the way you see this understanding of neuroscience being applied to cognition, work, and decision making in a world where we have AI as part of those processes.

Joanna Michalska: I think it's a fascinating area of science, and we as humans, especially in this fast-paced environment, as leaders, really need to evolve our capability of not only managing organizations, but also leading the people side of things. Historically, the human brain and mindset take time to change; it's not something that changes overnight, and it typically requires a trigger, which is usually not very pleasant for someone to take responsibility or ownership of that change.

Now, when you think about the acceleration of decisions and what happens around the organization—because when we think about business, evolving organizations, or being accountable to shareholders, regulators, or society—we can't just remain the same. That means our mindset and our ability to become more human really matter. Emotional intelligence, relationship-building skills, recognizing the importance of trust, building psychological safety so people can take responsibility at every level of the organization, and having the courage to say, "This is not working, I've seen this problem, something doesn't feel right, I'm going to escalate to the right person because I know who the right person is"—all of that really comes from personal qualities and owning those qualities that just cannot be replaced by machines.

There's a gap between what machines are taking over in terms of processes and things that can be done easily, and, to my earlier example, that almost brings a higher weight and pressure onto us to become better—much more resilient, agile, responsible, and accountable. Those qualities, maybe we weren't really owning to the same extent in the past because we were focused on performative activities much more. That will be required of us through all the external pressures, but also because we want to achieve better outcomes not just for organizations, but for broader society. That sense of responsibility for an impact that is much deeper and more long-lasting is very important. From a leadership perspective, it's almost like role modeling becomes even more important for everyone else in the organization, and it creates a higher level of satisfaction, engagement, and level of happiness for everyone.

Ross Dawson: So, this is about personal growth in a way—becoming more, as you say, building these human qualities that we need so much in this world. But at the same time, very few people are not experiencing pressure or stress, not least from the pace of change through AI and many other things. There are countervailing forces: we're being called to be more human, to bring out more of ourselves, but the context is extraordinary challenge. What are specific things that leaders or organizations can do to help people draw out those capabilities?

Joanna Michalska: I think there are a couple of things to start with. I would always say awareness is the first step, and leadership awareness of where the gap is and what's actually required is very important. Integrity and honesty follow right after, because people know what's happening—or even if they don't know, they'll fill in the blanks with probably not very positive things. Once fear starts to creep in, it erodes trust and confidence, and it also takes away from participation. No matter what transformation you're trying to achieve in your organization, you need your people engaged.

Executives need to be honest about what's happening. I've seen a lot of examples where leadership is not honest—they say, "Don't worry, you're not going to lose your job, it's going to be fine," while everyone knows their job will either be lost or significantly changed. That level of honesty is important: having a uniform communication strategy to communicate honestly to people and say, "Things will change. Things are already changing, but we will take care of you, and this is how it's going to look." I'm not saying to lie; you need to be appropriately honest and say, "Yes, there will probably be a reduction in roles, but this is the plan." How do we communicate honestly to people and make sure they understand that if their job will be eliminated, how will they be supported to develop capabilities and skills to go into another role or do something else somewhere else? That's a human thing to do—be honest and help people develop that capability.

The second part of that plan is to have, whether it's AI literacy or AI retraining, whatever the organization decides to do to help people develop the skill set they don't have. Organizationally, but also, as someone said at an event I attended recently, "What used to be a soft skill now really becomes a hard skill," because that's at the heart of everything. As more process-driven tasks are taken away by machines, those human skills will become very, very important and already are.

Ross Dawson: Yeah, and arguably, that's one of the possible benefits of AI—it helps us to become more human, or develop our intrinsically and distinctly human capabilities. So, Joanna, where can people go to find out more about your work?

Joanna Michalska: They can reach out to me on LinkedIn, And I do have also my website, that's called ethicagroup.ai, and I'm happy to connect on any topic related to what we've just discussed, especially executive authority, how we become more human, and how we can be at the center of what we can actually do within this very fast-moving environment. How do we have as executives and leaders more impact on changing this reality? Because, to your point earlier, if each of us doesn't take that responsibility, nothing's really going to change.

Ross Dawson: Indeed. Thank you so much for your time and your insights, Joanna.

Joanna Michalska: Thank you, Ross. Thank you for having me.

The post Joanna Michalska on AI governance, decision architectures, accountability pathways, and neuroscience in organizational transformation (HAI Ep36) appeared first on Humans + AI.

"You and I, we're part of this last analog generation. We had the opportunity to grow up in a time and age where our brains had to evolve against friction."

–Cornelia C. Walther

Cornelia C. Walther is Senior Fellow at Wharton School, a Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard University, and the Director of POZE, a global alliance for systemic change. She is author of many books, with her latest book, Artificial Intelligence for Inspired Action (AI4IA), due out shortly. She was previously a humanitarian leader working for over 20 years at the United Nations driving social change globally.

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Ross Dawson: Cornelia, it is fantastic to have you on the show

Cornelia Walther: Thank you for having me Ross.

Ross: So your work is very wonderfully humans plus AI, in being able to look at humans and humanity and how we can amplify the best as possible. That's one really interesting starting point is your idea of the hybrid tipping zone. Could you share with us what that is?

Cornelia: Yes, happy to. I would argue that we're currently navigating a very dangerous transition where we have four disconnected yet mutually accelerating phenomena happening. At the micro level, we have agency decay, and I'm sure we'll talk more about that later, but individuals are gradually delegating ever more of their thinking, feeling, and doing to AI.

We're losing not only control, but also the appetite and ability to take on all of these aspects, which are part of being ourselves. At the meso level, we have AI mainstreaming, where institutions—public, private, academic—are rushing to jump on the AI train, even though there are no medium or long-term evidences about how the consequences will play out.

Then at the macro level, we have the race towards AI supremacy, which, if we're honest, is not just something that the tech giants are engaged in, but also governments, because this is not just about money, it's also about power and geopolitical rivalry. And finally, at the meta level, we have the deterioration of the planet, with seven out of nine boundaries now crossed, some with partially irreversible damages.

Now, you have these four phenomena happening in parallel, simultaneously, and mutually accelerating each other. So the time to do something—and I would argue that the human level is the one where we have the most leeway, at least for now, to act—is now. You and I, we're part of this last analog generation.

We had the opportunity to grow up in a time and age where our brains had to evolve against friction. I don't know about you, but I didn't have a cell phone when I was a child, so I still remember my grandmother's phone number from when I was five years old. Today, I barely remember my own. Same thing with Google Maps—when was the last time you went to a city and explored with a paper map?

Now, these are isolated functions in the brain, but with ChatGPT, there's this general offloading opportunity, which is very convenient. But being human, I would argue, it's a very dangerous luxury to have.

Ross: I just want to dig down quite a lot in there, but I want to come back to this. So, just that phrase—the hybrid tipping zone. The hybrid is the humans plus AI, so humans and AI are essentially, whatever words we use, now working in tandem. The tipping zone suggests that it could tip in more than one way.

So I suppose the issue then is, what are those futures? Which way could it tip, and what are the things we can do to push it in one way or another—obviously towards the more desirable outcome?

Cornelia: Thank you. I think you're pointing towards a very important aspect, which is that tipping points can be positive or negative, but the essential thing is that we can do something to influence which way it goes. Right now, we consider AI like this big phenomenon that is happening to us. It is not—it is happening with, amongst, and because of us.

I think that is the big change that needs to happen in our minds, which is that AI is neutral at the end of the day. It's a means to an end, not an end in itself.

We have an opportunity to shift from the old saying—which I think still holds true—garbage in, garbage out, towards values in, values out. But for that, we need to start offline and think: what are the values that we stand for? What is the world that we want to live in and leave behind?

As you know, I'm a big defender of pro social AI, which refers to AI systems that are deliberately tailored, trained, tested, and targeted to bring out the best in and for people and planet.

Ross: So again, lots of angles to dig into, but I just want to come back to that agency decay. I created a framework around the cognitive impact of AI, going from, at the bottom, cognitive corruption and cognitive erosion, through to neutral aspects, to the potential for cognitive augmentation. There are some individuals, of course, who are getting their thinking corrupted or eroded, as you've suggested; others are using it well and in ways which are potentially enhancing their cognition.

So, there is what individuals can do to be able to do that. There's also what institutions, including education and employers, can do to provide the conditions where people are more likely to have a positive impact on cognition. But more broadly, the question is, again, how can we tip that more in the positive direction? Because absolutely, not just the potential, but the reality of cognitive erosion—or agency decay, as you describe it, which I think is a great phrase. So are there things we can do to move away from the widespread agency decay, which we are in danger of?

Cornelia: Yeah, I think maybe we could marry our two frameworks, because the scale of agency decay that I have developed looks at experience, experimentation, integration, reliance, and addiction. I would say we have now passed the stage of experimentation, and most of us are very deeply into the field of integration. That means we're just half a step away from reliance, where all of a sudden it becomes nearly unthinkable to write that email yourself, to do that calendar scheduling yourself, or to write that report from scratch. But that means we're just one step away from full-blown addiction.

At least now, we still have the possibility to compare the before and after, which comes back to us as an analog generation. Now is the time to invest in what I would call double literacy—a holistic understanding of our NI, our natural intelligence, but also our algorithmic, our AI. That requires a double literacy—not just AI literacy or digital literacy, but the complementarity of these two intelligences and their mutual influence, because none of them happens in a vacuum anymore.

Ross: Absolutely, So what you described—experiment, integration, reliance, addiction—sounds like a slippery slope. So, what are the things we can do to mitigate or push back against that, to use AI without being over-reliant, and where that experiment leads to integration in a positive way? What can we do, either as individuals or as employers or institutions, to stop that negative slide and potentially push back to a more positive use and frame?

Cornelia: A very useful tool that I have found resonates with many people is the A frame, which looks at awareness, appreciation, acceptance, and accountability. I have an alliteration affinity, as you can see. The awareness stage looks at the mindset itself and really disciplines us not to slip down that slope, but to be aware of the steps we're taking.

The appreciation is about what makes us, in our own NI, unique, and the appreciation of where, in combination with certain external tools, it can be better. We all have gaps, we all have weaknesses, and that's what we have to accept. The human being, even though now it's sometimes put in opposition to AI as the better one, is not perfect either. Like probably you and most of the listeners have read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and many others—there are libraries about human heuristics, human fallacies, our inability for actual rational thinking. But the fact that you have read a book does not mean that you are immune to that. We need to accept that this is part of our modus operandi, and in the same way as we are imperfect, AI, in many different ways, is also imperfect.

And finally, the accountability. Because at the end of the day, no matter how powerful our tools are going to be, we as the human decision makers should consider ourselves accountable for the outcomes.

Ross: Absolutely, that's one of the points I make. We can't obviously make machines accountable—ultimately, the accountability resides in humans. So we have to design systems, which I think provides a bit of a transition to pro social AI. So what is pro social AI, how do we build it, how do we deploy that, and how do we make that the center of AI development?

Cornelia: Thank you for that. Pro social AI, in a way, is very simple. It's the intent that matters, but it starts from scratch, so you have the regenerative intent embedded into the algorithmic architecture. It has four key elements that can be measured, tracked, and can also serve to sensitize those who use it and those who design it—tailored, framed, tested, targeted.

The pro social AI index that I've been working on over the past months combines that with the quadruple bottom line: purpose, people, profit, planet. Now all of a sudden, rather than talking in an airy-fairy way about ethical AI—which is great and necessary, but I would argue is not enough—we need to systematically think about how we can harness AI as a catalyst of positive transformation that is with environmental dignity and seeks planetary health. How can we measure that?

Ross: And so, what are we measuring? Are we measuring an AI system, or what is the assessment tool? What is it that is being assessed?

Cornelia: It's the how and the what for. For example, what data has been used? Is the data really representative? We know that the majority of AI tools are biased. And the other question is, is it only used for efficiency and effectiveness, but to what end?

Ross: Yes, as we are seeing in current conversations around the use of models at Anthropic and OpenAI, there are tools, and there are questions around how they are used, not just what the tools are.

Cornelia: Yes, so again, it comes back to the need for awareness and for hybrid intelligence, because at the end of the day, we can't rely on companies whose purpose is to make money to give systems that serve people and planet first and foremost.

Ross: This goes on to another one of your wonderful framings, which is AI for IA—AI for inspired action—around this idea of how do we amplify humans and humanity. Of course, this goes on to everything we've been discussing so far. But I think one of the things which is very useful there is AI, in a way, leading to humans taking action which is inspired around envisaging what is possible. So, how can we inspire positive action by people in the framing we've discussed?

Cornelia: AI for IA is the title of the new book that's coming out next month. But also, as with most of the things I'm saying, it's not about the technology—it's about the human being. We can't expect the technology of tomorrow to be better than the humans of today.

As I said before, garbage in, garbage out, or values in, values out—it's so simple and it's so uncomfortable, it's so cumbersome, right? Because we like quick fixes. But unfortunately, AI or technology in general is not going to save us from ourselves, and as it is right now, we're straightforward on a trend to repeat the mistakes made during the first, second, and third industrial revolutions, where technology and innovation were driven primarily by commercial intent.

Now, I would argue that this time around, we can't leave it at that, because this fourth industrial revolution has such a strong impact on the way we think, feel, and interact, that we need to start in our very own little courtyard to think: what kind of me do I want to see amplified?

Ross: Yes, yes. I've always thought that if AI amplifies us, or technology generally amplifies us, we will discover who we are, because the more we are amplified, the more we see ourselves writ large. But we have choices around, as you say, what aspects of who we are as individuals and as a society we can amplify. That's the critical choice. So the question is, how do we bring awareness to your word around what it is about us that we want to amplify, and how do we then selectively amplify that, rather than also amplify the negative aspects of humanity?

Cornelia: The first thing, and that's a simple one, is the A frame. I would argue that's something everyone can integrate in their daily routine in a very simple way, to remind us of the four A's: awareness, appreciation, acceptance, accountability. The other one, at the institutional level, is the integration of double literacy.

Right now, there's a lot of hype in schools and at the governmental level about AI literacy and digital literacy. I think that's only half of the equation. This is now an opportunity to take a step back and finally address this gap that has characterized education systems for many decades, where thinking and thinking about thinking—metacognition—is not taught in schools. Systems thinking, understanding cognitive biases, understanding interplays—now is the time to learn about that. If the future will be populated by humans that interact with artificial counterparts configured to address and exploit every single one of our human Achilles heels, then we would be better advised to know those Achilles heels. So, I think these are two relatively simple ways moving forward that could take us to a better place.

Ross: So this goes to one of your other books on human leadership for humane technology. So leadership of course, everyone is a leader in who they touch. We also have more formal leaders of organizations, nations, political parties, NGOs, and so on. But just taking this into a business context, there are many leaders now of organizations trying to transform their organizations because they understand that the world is different, and they need to be a different organization. They still need to make money to pay for their staff and what they are doing to develop the organization, but they have multiple purposes and multiple stakeholders. So, just thinking from an organizational leader perspective, what does human leadership for humane technology mean? What does that look like? What are the behaviors? What are the ways we can see that would show us?

Cornelia: I think first, it's a reframing away from this very narrow scope of return on investment, which has characterized the business scene for many decades, and looking at return on values. What is the bigger picture that we are actually part of and shaping here? What's the why at the end of the day? I think that matters for leaders who are in their place to guide others, and guidance is not just telling people what they have to do, but also inspiring them to want to do it.

Inspiration, at the end of the day, is something that comes from the inside out, because you see in the other person something that you would like in yourself. Power and money are not it—it's vision. I think this is maybe the one thing that is right now missing. We all tend to see the opportunity, but then we go with what everybody else is doing, because we don't really take the time to step back and think, well, there is the path of everyone, and there's another one—how should I explore that one?

Especially amidst AI, where just upscaling your company with additional tools is not really going to set you apart, it matters twice as much to not just think about how do I do more of the same with less investment and faster, but what makes me unique, and how can I now use the artificial treasure chests to amplify that?

Ross: Yes, yes. I think purpose is now well recognized beyond the business agenda. One of the critical aspects is that it attracts the most talented people, but also, over the years, we've had more and more opportunities to be different as an organization. Back in the late '90s and so on, organizations looked more and more the same. Now there are more and more opportunities to be different. The way in which AI and other technologies are brought into organizations gives an extraordinary array of possibilities to be unique, as you've described, and distinctive, which gives you a competitive position as well as being able to attract people who are aligned with your purpose.

Cornelia: Yes, exactly. But for that, you need to know your purpose first.

Ross: From everything we've just been talking about, or anything else, are there any examples of organizations or initiatives that you think are exemplars or support the way in which, or show how, we could be approaching this well?

Cornelia: I think—this will now sound very biased—but I'm currently working with Sunway University, and I think they are the kind of academic institution that is showing a different path, seeking to leverage technology to be more sustainable, bringing in dimensions such as planetary health, like the Sunway Centre for Planetary Health, and thinking about business in a re-envisioned way, with the Institute for Global Strategy and Competitiveness.

I think there are examples at the institutional level, there are examples at the individual level, and sometimes the most inspiring individuals are not those that make the headlines. That's maybe, sorry, just on that, for me the most important takeaway: no matter which place one is in the social food chain, the essential thing is, who are you and how can you inspire the person next to you to make it a better day, to make it a better future.

Ross: Yes, in fact, that word "inspired," as you mentioned before. So that's Sunway University in Malaysia?

Cornelia: I think they are definitely a very, very good illustration of that.

Ross: Just pulling this back to the global frame, and this gets quite macro, but I think it is very important. It pulls together some of the things we've pointed to—the difference between the approach of the United States, China, Europe, in how they are, you know, essentially the leaders in AI and how they're going about it, but where the global south more generally, I think there's some interesting things. Arguably, there's a far more positive attitude generally in the populations, a sense of the opportunity to transform themselves, but of course a very different orientation in how they want to use and apply AI and in creating value for individuals, nations, and society. So how would you frame those four—the US, China, Europe, and the global south—and how they are, or could be, approaching the development of AI?

Cornelia: Thank you for that. I think right now there are three mainstream patterns: the US, which is—I'm overly simplifying and aware of that—the US path, which is business overall; the European model, which is regulation overall; and the Chinese model, which is state dominance. I would argue there's a fourth path, and I think that's where leaders in the global south can step in.

You might know I'm working, on the one hand, in Malaysia and, on the other hand, in Morocco, on the development of a sort of national blueprint of what pro social AI can look like. I think now is the time—again, coming back to leadership—to think about how countries can walk a different path and be pioneers in a field that, yes, AI has been around for various decades, but the latest trend, the latest wave that is engulfing society since November 2022, is still relatively new. So why not have nations in the global south that are very different from the West chart their own path and make it pro social, pro people, pro planet, and pro potential—and that potential that they have themselves, which sets them apart and makes them unique.

Ross: Absolutely. Again, you mentioned Malaysia, Morocco. Looking around the world, of course, India is prominent. There are some African nations which have done some very interesting things. Just trying to think, where are other examples of these kinds of domestically born pro social initiatives happening? Of course, the Middle East—it's quite different, because they're wealthy, though they're not among the major leaders, but there's a whole array of different examples. Where would you point to as things which show how we could be using pro social AI at a national or regional level?

Cornelia: Unfortunately, right now, there is not one country where one could say they have taken it from A to Z, but I think there are very inspiring or positive examples. For example, Vietnam was the first country in ASEAN to endorse a law on AI ethics and regulation—I think that's a very good one. Also, ASEAN has guidelines on ethics. All of these are points of departure. Switzerland did a very nice example of what public AI can look like. So there are a lot of very good examples.

The question is not so much about what to do, I think, but how to do it, and why. At the end of the day, it's really that simple. What's the intent behind it? What do we want the post-2030 agenda to look like? We know that the SDG—Sustainable Development Goals—are not going to be fulfilled between now and 2030. So are we learning from these lessons, or are we following the track pattern of doing more of the same and maybe throwing in a couple of additional indicators, or can we really take a step back and look ourselves and the world in the face and think, what have we missed? Now, frame it however you want, but think about hybrid development goals and ways in which means and ends—society and business—come together into a more holistic equation that respects planetary health. Because at the end of the day, our survival still depends on the survival and flourishing of planet Earth, and some might cherish the idea of emigrating to Mars, but I still think that overall the majority of us would prefer to stay here.

Ross: Yes, planet Earth is beautiful, and it'd be nice to keep it that way. How can people find more about your work? Could you just tell people about your new book and any resources where people can find out more?

Cornelia: Thank you so much. They are very welcome to reach out via LinkedIn. Also, I'm writing regularly on Psychology Today, on Knowledge at Wharton, and various other platforms. The new book that you mentioned is coming out next month, and there will be another one, hopefully by the end of the year. Overall, feel free to reach out. I really feel that the more people get into this different trend of thinking, the better. But thank you so much for the opportunity.

Ross: Thanks so much for all of your work, Cornelia. It's very important.

The post Cornelia C. Walther on AI for Inspired Action, return on values, prosocial AI, and the hybrid tipping zone (HAI Ep35) appeared first on Humans + AI.

"Transparency has to be built into the structure so that you know where the decision is made, what authorizations are given, and have an audit trail visible so you can always see what is going on."

–Ross Dawson

Ross Dawson is a futurist, keynote speaker, strategy advisor, author, and host of Amplifying Cognition podcast. He is Chairman of the Advanced Human Technologies group of companies and Founder of Humans + AI startup Informivity. He has delivered keynote speeches and strategy workshops in 33 countries and is the bestselling author of 5 books, most recently Thriving on Overload.

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Ross Dawson

Ross Dawson: This episode is a little bit different. Instead of doing an interview with somebody remarkable, as usual, today I'm going to just share a bit of an update and then share insights from three recent research papers that dig into something which I think is exceptionally important, which is how humans work with AI agentic systems. And we'll look at a few different layers of that, from how small humans plus agent teams work through to how we can delegate decisions to AI through to some of the broader implications.

But first, a bit of an update.

2026 seems to be moving exceptionally fast. It's a very interesting time to be alive, and I think it's pretty even hard to see what the end of this year is going to look like.

So for me, I am doing my client work as usual. So I've got keynotes around the world on usually various things related to AI, the future of AI, humans plus AI, and so on. A few industry-specific ones in financial services and so on.

And also doing some work as an advisor on AI transformation programs, so helping organizations and their leaders to frame the pathways, drawing on my AI roadmap framework in how it is you look at the phases, mapping those out, working out the issues, and being able to guide and coach the leaders to do that effectively.

But the rest of my time is focused on three ventures, and I'll share some more about these later on. But these are fairly evidently tied to my core interests.

Fractious is our AI for strategy app. So this was really building a way in which we can capture the detailed nuance of the strategic thinking of leaders of the organization, to disambiguate it, to clarify it, and enable that to then be built into strategic options, strategic hypotheses, and to be able to evolve effectively.

So that'll be in beta soon. Please reach out if you're interested in being part of the beta program, and that'll go to market. So that's deeply involved in that.

We also have our Thought Weaver software, rebuilding previous software which had already built on AI-augmented thinking workflows. So again, that'll be going to beta. That's more an individual tool that will be going into beta in the next weeks.

So again, go to Thought Weaver. Actually, don't—the website isn't updated yet—but I'll let you know when it's out, or keep posted for updates on that.

And also building an enterprise course on humans plus AI teaming. It's my fundamental belief that we've kind of been through the phase of augmentation of individuals, and we still need to work hard at doing that better. But the next phase for organizations is to focus on teams.

How do you work with teams where we have both human members and AI Agentic members? And it creates a whole different series of dynamics and new skills and capabilities. It really calls for how to participate in the humans plus AI team and how to lead humans plus AI teams.

And that is again going into the first few test organizations in the next month or so. So again, just let me know.

So today what we're going to look at is this theme: teams of humans working with AI agents. So not individual AI as in chat, but where we have a lot of agents with various degrees of autonomy, but also agentic systems where these agents are interacting with each other as well as with humans.

So there are three papers which I want to just talk about, just give you a quick overview, and please go and check out the papers in more detail if you're interested. There'll be links in the show notes.

First is Collaborating with AI Agents: A Field Experiment on Teamwork, Productivity and Performance, by Harang Ju at Johns Hopkins and Sinan Aral at MIT.

So this, there was an experiment which had over 2,300 participants who were working on creating advertisements. And they had a whole array of humans plus AI, human-human teams, human-AI teams, sort of quite small or just in duos and so on, working on being able to create those which were then assessed in terms of quality and how they worked.

So a few particularly interesting findings from that.

So individually, just having a human-AI team essentially enhanced performance significantly compared to just human-only teams. And so they were able to move faster and to complete more of their tasks, and the quality was strong.

But there's a phrase which is commonly used around the jagged frontier of capability of AI, and it was quite clear that there were some domains where AI does very well and others where it didn't.

And so this comes to the part where, in terms of the design of the tasks, the design of the human-AI systems, and also the understanding by the human users of what AI is good at or not, is fundamental in being able to do that.

And so in some cases, if AI was used in some domains such as image quality, they actually decreased quality. So we need to understand where and how both to apply AI in this jagged frontier and design the systems around that.

This changes the role of the humans, of course. Humans then tend to delegate more. And there's one of the things which they tested for, which is how do you behave differently if you know your teammate is an AI as opposed to not knowing whether a human or AI.

And it changes. So they become more task-oriented. They are less using the social cues to interact, and they are essentially becoming more efficient.

But some of these social cues which are valuable in the human-human collaboration started to disappear.

And this automation process meant that there was not, in the end, as much creative diversity.

Now I've often pointed to the role of AI in creativity tasks. It depends fundamentally on the architecture—where does the AI sit in terms of initial ideas which are then sorted by filtered by humans and then are involved, or where it sits in that process.

But in this particular structure, they found that humans plus AI teams started to create more and more similar-type outputs.

So this homogenization of outputs in these human-AI teams was very notable and significant. And so this again creates a design factor for how it is that we build human-AI systems which actually do not lead to homogeneous output.

And we're making sure that we are ensuring that the human diversity is maintained.

Often that can be done by being able to have human outputs first without AI then blunting or narrowing the breadth of the creative outputs of humans.

Second paper I'd like to point to is called Intelligent AI Delegation, from a team at Google DeepMind.

So this is this point where we now have not just single AI agents to delegate decisions to or problems to, but in fact systems of AI. And so this creates a different challenge.

And the key point is, I'm saying this, is around you are delegating tasks, but when you are delegating tasks it's more than just saying, okay, which agent gets the task. You have to understand responsibility.

So where does accountability reside? Who is responsible for that? How clarity around the roles of the agents, what are the boundaries of what it is they can do and cannot do, the clarity of the intent, and how that's communicated and cascaded through the agents, and the critical role of trust and appropriate degrees of trust in the systems.

So this means that we have to define what are the different characteristics of the task. And in the paper it goes through quite a few different characteristics. And a few of the critical ones was the degree of uncertainty around the task.

Obviously, if it is very clear that can be appropriately delegated, but many tasks and problems are uncertain. And so this creates a different dynamic.

Whether verifiable, as you know you have high-quality information, or whether that's the degree of uncertainty around whether decisions are reversible, the degree of subjectivity, because not everything is data-driven.

And so assessing these task characteristics start to define where human judgment plays a role, how do you create those checks, and how do you build that.

So this creates a system so intelligent delegation is not just how the humans delegate, but in turn the structure of how that cascades down through the agents.

So this requires this idea of dynamic assessment.

So you're not just setting and forgetting. You are continuously reassessing what is happening with the context, what is changing in the stakes, any uncertainty.

So you're coming back to be able to ensure there's not just a single delegation structure, but you're changing it over time.

And you'll continue to adapt as you're executing, and be able to monitor, replan, and set.

So transparency has to be built into the structure so that you have where the decision is made, what authorizations are given, you know where the audit trail is visible so you can always see what is going on in those structures.

And being able to scale how you are coordinating the systems.

And if it's just small scale that's fine, but you want to be able to build something which has been able to move across many agents.

And so this requires a way of being able to discover which agents are most appropriate and be able to essentially establish the delegation of a particular task to them again on a dynamic basis.

And essentially this final principle of systemic resilience, where you have to expect that things will go wrong.

So there's continuing monitoring, being able to understand that these systems can be attacked in various ways and being able to recover.

So, very solid paper, quite deep, but really giving some very good principles for how it is we can delegate to AI systems.

So the final of the three papers goes to a bit of a higher level.

It's called Agentic Interactions, and it's from Alex Imas, Sanjog Misra of the University of Chicago, and Kevin Lee at the University of Michigan.

And what they're looking at is what happens on a macro scale when increasingly decisions are delegated to AI agents.

So this is the agent economy that I've been talking about for a very long time, which is now very much coming to the fore.

And so what they do is they look at what happens when we start to delegate more and more economic decisions, such as buying and selling decisions.

So what they found is extraordinarily interesting.

They found that the AI agents in fact do behave very similarly to their human creators.

And in fact what you can observe is that there are differences in the agents where you can infer the gender and the personality of the person who is delegating the agent.

Even though there is no information, the agent doesn't even know what the gender or the personality is, they are actually flowing through.

So in fact agents represent us in the market as it were, potentially very accurately.

But this goes directly to the second point where this idea of machine fluency.

And so AI fluency is very much a term in vogue at the moment.

So the authors talk about this idea of machine fluency which is how well can a user put their intent and align that with the agent so the agent is aligned with them.

And in fact they found that there's very significant degrees of difference in those.

And those people who are better at being able to get their agents to express their wishes could in fact amplify the economic outcomes of these people.

And related to that in fact they showed there was a correlation that higher educational levels mean that you were able to better delegate to AI, and your AI agents performed better and gave you better returns.

So again pointing to these ways in which we're starting to see potentials for aggravation of differences in the agentic economy when our agents who act for us in the economy start to reflect among other things educational differences or capabilities in how it is we express our results and our intentions through AI.

There was one very interesting and I suppose counterintuitive result.

Women get better outcomes in negotiation when using AI agents than they do in human-to-human interactions.

Again this is without the AI agents knowing that they are representing a woman or not.

But in fact this shows that the style and the way on the machine fluency the ways in which women are able to instruct and put their intent into the AI agents is in this study superior to those of males.

And there's of course in the real world unfortunately a bias towards male performance in negotiation.

And that was inversed in the study.

So exceptionally interesting.

So just pulling back some of the common themes of these three papers.

We increasingly want a world where humans have relationships to agents.

We are starting to work with them in teams and systems.

And we're starting to build economies where humans are represented by agents.

And essentially our relationship to those agents and our ability to delegate effectively is driving value of course to the individual but also across these agentic systems that are emerging.

So this is early on because the realities of these agentic human-agent systems are pretty early at this point.

But this starts to point to some of the potential, some of the challenges, some of the opportunities, and some of the work that we have to do.

So I will be sharing more on these kinds of topics in my interviews with people and also of course on the Humans Plus AI website.

So just go to humansplus.ai.

Actually to be frank it hasn't been updated a lot recently but we will be sharing a lot more there.

Or LinkedIn is where I share the most actually, and getting back on Twitter as well if you're interested.

But I'll be diving deep and trying to share what I find is useful as well as interesting in helping us to create a world where humans are first.

AI complements us.

The reality is we are moving to humans plus AI systems.

And if we design that well with the right intentions we can make this absolutely one which drives human value first.

So glad to have you on the journey.

Have a wonderful rest of your day.

The post Ross Dawson on Humans + AI Agentic Systems (HAI Ep34) appeared first on Humans + AI.

"In this sense, human and AI means a synergy where teams of humans and AI together lead to superior outcomes than either the human or the AI operating in isolation."

– Davide Dell’Anna

Davide Dell’Anna is Assistant Professor of Responsible AI at Utrecht University, and a member of the Hybrid Intelligence Centre. His research focuses on how AI can cooperate synergistically and proactively with humans. Davide has published a wide range of leading research in the space.

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Ross Dawson: Hi Davide. It's wonderful to have you on the show.

Davide Dell'Anna: Hi Ross, nice to meet you. Thank you so much for having me.

Ross: So you do a lot of work around what you call hybrid intelligence, and I think that's pretty well aligned with a lot of the topics we have on the podcast. But I'd love to hear your definition and framing—what is hybrid intelligence?

Davide: Well, thank you so much for the question. Hybrid intelligence is a new paradigm, or a paradigm that tries to move the public narrative away from the common focus on replacement—AI or robots taking over our jobs. While that's an understandable fear, more scientifically and societally, I think it's more interesting and relevant to think of humans and AI as collaborators.

In this sense, human and AI means a synergy where teams of humans and AI together lead to superior outcomes than either the human or the AI operating in isolation. In a human-AI team, members can compensate for each other's weaknesses and amplify each other's strengths. The goal is not to substitute human capabilities, but to augment them.

This immediately moves the discussion from "what can the AI do to replace me?" to "how can we design the best possible team to work together?" I think that's the foundation of the concept of hybrid intelligence. So hybrid intelligence, per se, is the ultimate goal. We aim at designing or engineering these human-AI teams so that we can effectively and responsibly collaborate together to achieve this superior type of intelligence, which we then call hybrid intelligence.

Ross: That's fantastic. And so extremely aligned with the humans plus AI thesis. That's very similar to what I might have said myself, not using the word hybrid intelligence, but humans plus AI to say the same thing. We want to dive into the humans-AI teaming specifically in a moment.

But in some of your writing, you've commented that, while others are thinking about augmentation in various ways, you point out that these are not necessarily as holistic as they could be. So what do you think is missing in some of the other ways people are approaching AI as a tool of augmentation?

Davide: Yeah, so I think when you look at the literature—as a computer scientist myself, I notice how easily I fall into the trap of only discussing AI capabilities. When I talk about AI or even human-AI teams, I end up talking about how I can build the AI to do this, or how I can improve the process in this way. Most of the literature does that as well. There's a technology-centric perspective to the discussion of even human-AI teams.

We try to understand what we can build from the AI point of view to improve a team. But if you think of human-AI teams in this way, you realize that this significantly limits our vocabulary and our ability to look at the team from a broader, system-level perspective, where each member—including and especially human team members—is treated individually, and their skills and identity are considered and leveraged.

So, if you look at the literature, you often end up talking about how to add one feature to the AI or how to extend its feature set in other ways. But what people often miss is looking at the weaknesses and strengths of the different individuals, so that we can engineer for their compensation and amplification. Machines and people are fundamentally different: humans are good at some things, AI is good at others, and we shouldn't try to negate or hide or be ashamed of the things we're worse at than AI, and vice versa. Instead, we should leverage those differences.

For instance, just as an example, consider memory and context awareness. At the moment, at least, AI is much more powerful in having access to memory and retrieving it in a matter of seconds—AI can access basically the whole internet. But often, when you talk nowadays with these language model agents, they are completely decontextualized. They talk in the same way to millions across the world and often have very little clue about who the specific person is in front of them, what that person's specific situation is—maybe they're in an airport with noise, or just one minute from giving a lecture and in a rush. The type of things you might say also change based on the specific situation.

While this is a limitation of AI, we shouldn't forget that there is the human there. The human has that contextual knowledge. The human brings that crucial context. Sometimes we tend to say, "Okay, but then we can build an AI that can understand the context around it," but we already have the human for that.

Ross: Yes, yes. I don't think that's what I call the framing. Framing should come from the human, because that's what we understand—including the ethical and other human aspects of the context, as well as that broader frame. It's interesting because, in talking about hybrid intelligence, I think many who come to augmentation or hybrid intelligence think of it on an individual basis: how can an individual be augmented by AI, or, for example, in playing various games or simulations, humans plus AI teaming together, collaborating. But the team means you have multiple humans and quite probably multiple AI agents.

So, in your research, what have you observed if you're comparing a human-only team and a team which has both human and AI participants? What are some of the things that are the same, and what are some of the things that are different?

Davide: Yes, this is a very interesting question. We've recently done work in collaboration with a number of researchers from the Hybrid Intelligence Center, which I am part of. If you're not familiar with it, the Hybrid Intelligence Center is a collaboration that involves practically all the Dutch universities focused on hybrid intelligence, and it's a long project—lasting around 10 years.

One of the works we've done recently is to try to study to what extent established properties of effective human teams could be used to characterize human-AI teams. We looked at instruments that people use in practice to characterize human teams. One of them is called the Team Diagnostic Survey, which is an instrument people use to diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of human teams. It includes a number of dimensions that are generally considered important for effective human teams.

These include aspects like members demonstrating their commitment to the team by putting in extra time and effort to help it succeed, the presence of coaches available in the team to help the team improve over time, and things related to the satisfaction of the members with the team, with the relationships with other members, and with the work they're doing.

What we've done was to study the extent to which we could use these dimensions to characterize human-AI teams. We looked at different types of configurations of teams—some had one AI agent and one human, others had multiple agents and multiple humans, for example in a warehouse context where you have multiple robots helping out in the warehouse that have to cooperate and collaborate with multiple humans.

We tried to understand whether the properties of—by the way, we also looked at an interesting case, which is human-animal-animal teams, which is another example that's interesting in the context of hybrid intelligence. You see very often in human-animal interaction—basically two species, two alien species—interacting and collaborating with each other. They often manage to collaborate pretty effectively, and there is an awareness of what both the humans and the animals are doing that is fascinating, at least for me.

So, we tried to analyze whether properties of human teams could be understood when looking at human-AI teams or hybrid teams, and to what extent. One of the things we found is that some concepts are very well understood and easily applicable to different types of hybrid teams. For example, the idea of interdependence—the fact that members in the team, in order to be a team, need to be mutually dependent, at least to some extent. Otherwise, if they're all doing separate jobs, there's a lack of common goal.

There are also things related to having a clear mission or a clear objective as a team, and aspects related to the possibility of exhibiting autonomy in the operation of the team and taking initiative. Also, the presence and awareness of team norms, like a shared ethical code or shared knowledge about what is appropriate or not. These were things that we found people could easily understand and apply to different configurations of teams.

Ross: Just actually, one thing—I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Mohammad Hussain Johari, who did this wonderful paper called "What Human-Horse Interactions May Teach Us About Effective Human-AI Interactions." Again, these are the cases where we can have these parallels—learning how to do human-AI interactions from human-human and human-animal interactions. But again, it comes back to that original question: what is the same? I think you described many of those facets of the nature of teams and collaboration, which means they are the same. But there are, of course, some differences. One of the many differences is accountability, essentially, where the AI agents are not accountable, whereas the humans are. That's one thing. So, this allocation of decision rights across different participants—human and AI—needs to take into account that they're not equal participants. Humans have accountability, and AI does not. That's one possible example.

Davide: Yeah, definitely. I totally agree, and I remember the paper you mentioned. I agree that human-animal collaboration is a very interesting source of inspiration. When looking at this paper, we looked at the case of shepherds and shepherd dogs. I didn't know much about it before, but then I started digging a little bit. Shepherd dogs are trained at the beginning, but over time, they learn a type of communication with the shepherd. Through whistles, the shepherd can give very short commands, and then the shepherd dogs—even in pairs—can quickly understand what they need to do. They go through the mountains, collect all the sheep, and bring them exactly as intended by the shepherd, with very little need for words or other types of communication. They manage to achieve their goals very effectively.

So, I think we have a lot to learn from these cases, even though it's difficult to study. But just to mention differences, of course—one of the things that emerged from this paper is the inherent human-AI asymmetry. Like you mentioned, accountability is definitely one aspect. I think overall, we should always give the human a different type of role in the team, similar to the shepherd and the shepherd dogs. There is some hierarchy among the members, and this makes it possible for humans to preserve meaningful control in the interactions. This also implies that different rules or expectations apply to different team members.

Beyond these, there is asymmetry in skills and capabilities, as we mentioned earlier, and also in aspects related to the identity of the members. For instance, some AI could be more easily replaceable than humans. Think, for example, of robots in a warehouse. In a human team, you wouldn't say you "replace" a team member—it's not the nicest way to say you let someone go and bring someone else in. But with robots, you could say, "I replace this machine because it's not working anymore," and that's fine. We can replace machines with little consequence, though this doesn't always hold, because there are studies showing that people get attached to machines and AI in general.

There was a recent case of ChatGPT releasing a new version and stopping the previous one, and people complained because they got attached to the previous version. So, in some cases, replacing the AI member would work well, but in others, it needs to be done more carefully.

Ross: So one of the other things looked at is the evaluation of human-AI teams. If we're looking at human teams and possibly relative performance compared to human-AI teams, what are ways in which we can measure effectiveness? I suppose this includes not just output or speed or outcomes, but potentially risk, uncertainty, explainability, or other factors.

Davide: Yes, this is an interesting question, and I think it's still an open question to some extent. From the study I mentioned earlier, we looked at how people measure human team effectiveness. There are aspects concerning, of course, the success of the team in doing the task, but these are not the only measures of effectiveness that people consider in human teams.

People often consider things related to the satisfaction of the members—with their teammates, with the process of working together, and with the overall goals of the team. This often leads to reflection from the team itself during operation, at least in human teams, where people reassess and evaluate their output throughout the process to make sure satisfaction with the process and relationships goes well over time.

In general, there are aspects to measure concerning the effectiveness of teams related to the process itself, which are often forgotten. It's a matter, at least from a research point of view, of resources, because to evaluate a full process over time, you need to run experiments for longer periods. Often people stop at one instant or a few interactions, but if you think of human teams, like the usual forming, storming, norming, and performing, that often goes over a long time. Teams often operate for a long time and improve over time. So, the process itself needs to be monitored and reassessed over time. This is a way to also measure the effectiveness of the team, but over time.

Ross: Interesting point, because as you say, the dynamics of team performance with a human team improve as people get to know each other and find ways of working. They can become cohesive as a team. That's classically what happens in defense forces and in creating high-performance teams, where you understand and build trust in each other. Trust is a key component of that.

With AI agents, if they are well designed, they can learn themselves or respond to changing situations in order to evolve. But it becomes a different dynamic when you have humans building trust and mutual understanding, where that becomes a system in which the AI is potentially responding or evolving. At its best, there's the potential for that to create a better performing team, but it does require both the attitudes of the humans and well the agents.

Davide: Related to this—if I can interrupt you—I think this is very important that you mentioned trust. Indeed, this is one of the aspects that needs to be considered very carefully. You shouldn't over-trust another team member, but also shouldn't under-trust. Appropriate trust is key.

One of the things that drives, at least in human teams, trust and overall performance is also team ethics. Related to the metrics you mentioned earlier, the ability of a team to gather around a shared ethical code and stick to that, and to continuously and regularly update each other's norms and ensure that actions are aligned with the shared norms, is crucial. This ethical code significantly affects trust in operation.

You can see it very easily in human teams: considering ethical aspects is essential, and we take them into account all the time. We respect each other's goals and values. We expect our collaborators to keep their promises and commitments, and if they cannot, they can explain or justify what they are doing. These justifications are also a key element. The ability to provide justifications for behavior is very important for hybrid teams as well. Not only the AI, but also the human should be able to justify their actions when necessary.

This is where the concept of hybrid teams and, in general, hybrid intelligence requires a bit of a philosophical shift from the traditional technology-centric perspective. For example, in AI, we often talk about explainability or explainable AI, which is about looking at model computations and understanding why a decision was made. But here, we're talking about a different concept: justifiability, which looks at the same problem from a different angle. It considers team actions in the context of shared values, shared goals, and the norms we've agreed upon. This requires a shift in the way we implement AI agents—they need to be aware of these norms, able to learn and adapt to team norms, and reason about them in the same way we do in society.

Ross: Let's say you've got an organization and they have teams, as most organizations do, and now we're moving from classic human teams to humans plus AI teams—collaborative human-AI teams. What are the skills and capabilities that the individual participants and the leaders in the teams need to transition from human-only teams to teams that include both humans and AI members?

Davide: This is a complicated question, and I don't have a full answer, but I can definitely reflect on different skills that a hybrid team should have. I'm thinking now of recent work—not published yet—where we started moving from the quality model work I mentioned earlier towards more detailed guidelines for human-AI teams. There, we developed a number of guidelines for organizations for putting in place and operating effective teams.

We categorized these guidelines in terms of different phases of team processes. For instance, we developed guidelines related to structuring the teamwork—the envisioning of the operations of the team, which roles the team members would have, which responsibilities the different team members should have. Here, I'm talking about team members, but I'm still referring to hybrid teams, so this applies to both humans and AI.

This also implies different types of skills that we often don't have yet in AI systems. For example, flexible team composition is a type of skill required to make it possible at the early stage of the team to structure the team in the right way. There are also skills related to developing shared awareness and aspects related to breaking down the task collaboratively or ensuring a continuous evolution of the team over time, with regular reassessment of the output.

If you think of these notions, it's easy to think about them in terms of traditional organizations, but when you imagine a human-AI team or a small hybrid organization, then this continuous evolution, regular output assessment, and flexible team composition are not so natural anymore. What does it mean for an LLM agent to interact with someone else? Usually, LLM architectures rely on static roles and predefined workflows—you need to define beforehand the prompts they will exchange—whereas humans use much more flexible protocols. We can adjust our protocols over time, monitor what we're doing, and reassess whether it works or not, and change the protocols.

These are skills required for the assistants, but also for the organization itself to make hybrid teaming possible. One of the things that emerges in this recent work is a new figure that would probably come up in organizations: a team designer or a team facilitator. This is not a team member per se, but an expert in teams and AI teammates, who can perhaps configure the AI teammates based on the needs of the team, and provide human team members with information needed about the skills or capabilities of the specific AI team member. It's an intermediary between humans and AI, with expertise that other human team members may not have, and could help these teams work together.

Ross: That's fantastic. It's wonderful to learn about all this work. Is there anywhere people can go to find out more about your research?

Davide: Yeah, sure. You can look me up at my website, davidedellanna.com. That's my main website—I try to keep it up to date. Through there, you can see the different projects I'm involved in, the papers we're working on, both with collaborators and with PhD and master students, who often bring great contributions to our research, even in their short studies.

That's the main hub, and you can also find many openly available resources linked to the projects that people may find useful.

Ross: Fantastic. Well, it's wonderful work—very highly aligned with the idea of hybrid intelligence, and it's fantastic that you are focusing on that, because there's not enough people yet focusing in the area. So you and your colleagues are ahead, and I'm sure many more will join you. Thank you so much for your time and your insights.

Davide: Thank you so much, Ross. Pleasure to meet you.

The post Davide Dell’Anna on hybrid intelligence, guidelines for human-AI teams, calibrating trust, and team ethics (HAI Ep33) appeared first on Humans + AI.

"You can create a virtual board of directors that will have different expertises and that will come up with ideas that a given person may not come up with."

– Felipe Csaszar

Felipe Csaszar is the Alexander M. Nick Professor and chair of the Strategy Area at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. He has published and held senior editorial roles in top academic journals including Strategy Science, Management Science, and Organization Science, and is co-editor of the upcoming Handbook of AI and Strategy.

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Ross Dawson: Felipe, it's a delight to have you on the show.

Felipe Csaszar: Oh, the pleasure is mine, Ross. Thank you very much for inviting me.

Ross Dawson: So many, many interesting things for us to dive into. But one of the themes that you've been doing a lot of research and work on recently is the role of AI in strategic decision making. Of course, humans have been traditionally the ones responsible for strategy, and presumably will continue to be for some time.

However, AI can play a role. Perhaps set the scene a little bit first in how you see this evolving.

Felipe Csaszar: Yeah, yeah. So, as you say, strategic decision making so far has always been a human task. People have been in charge of picking the strategy of a firm, of a startup, of anything, and AI opens a possibility that now you could have humans helped by AI, and maybe at some point, AI is designing the strategies of companies.

One way of thinking about why this may be the case is to think about the cognitive operations that are involved in strategic decision making. Before AI, that was my research—how people came up with strategies. There are three main cognitive operations. One is to search: you try different things, you try different ideas, until you find one which is good enough—that is searching.

The other is representing: you think about the world from a given perspective, and from that perspective, there's a clear solution, at least for you. That's another way of coming up with strategies. And then another one is aggregating: you have different opinions of different people, and you have to combine them. This can be done in different ways, but a typical one is to use the majority rule or unanimity rule sometimes. In reality, the way in which you combine ideas is much more complicated than that—you take parts of ideas, you pick and choose, and you combine something.

So there are these three operations: search, representation, and aggregation. And it turns out that AI can change each one of those. Let's go one by one. So, search: now AIs, the current LLMs, they know much more about any domain than most people.

There's no one who has read as much as an LLM, and they are quite fast, and you can have multiple LLMs doing things at the same time. So LLMs can search faster than humans and farther away, because you can only search things which you are familiar with, while an LLM is familiar with many, many things that we are not familiar with. So they can search faster and farther than humans—a big effect on search.

Then, representation: a typical example before AI about the value of representations is the story of Merrill Lynch. The big idea of Merrill Lynch was how good a bank would look if it was like a supermarket. That's a shift in representations. You know how a bank looks like, but now you're thinking of the bank from the perspective of a supermarket, and that leads to a number of changes in how you organize the bank, and that was the big idea of Mr. Merrill Lynch, and the rest is history.

That's very difficult for a human—to change representations. People don't like changing; it's very difficult for them, while for an AI, it's automatic, it's free. You change their prompt, and immediately you will have a problem looked at from a different representation.

And then the last one was aggregating. You can aggregate with AI virtual personas. For example, you can create a virtual board of directors that will have different expertises and that will come up with ideas that a given person may not come up with. And now you can aggregate those. Those are just examples, because there are different ways of changing search, representation, and aggregation, but it's very clear that AI, at least the current version of AI, has the potential to change these three cognitive operations of strategy.

Ross Dawson: That's fantastic. It's a novel framing—search, representation, aggregation. Many ways of framing strategy and the strategy process, and that is, I think, quite distinctive and very, very insightful, because it goes to the cognitive aspect of strategy.

There's a lot to dig into there, but I'd like to start with the representation. I think of it as the mental models, and you can have implicit mental models and explicit mental models, and also individual mental models and collective mental models, which goes to the aggregation piece. But when you talk about representation, to what degree—I mean, you mentioned a metaphor there, which, of course, is a form of representing a strategic space. There are, of course, classic two by twos. There are also the mental models which were classically used in investment strategy. So what are the ways in which we can think about representation from a human cognitive perspective, before we look at how AI can complement it?

Felipe Csaszar: I think it's important to distinguish—again, it's three different things. There are three different types of representations. There are the internal representations: how people think in their minds about a given problem, and that usually people learn through experience, by doing things many times, by working at a given company—you start looking at the world from a given perspective.

Part of the internal representations you can learn at school, also, like the typical frameworks.

Then there are external representations—things that are outside our mind that help us make decisions. In strategy, essentially everything that we teach are external representations. The most famous one is called Porter's Five Forces, and it's a way of thinking about what affects the attractiveness of an industry in terms of five different things. This is useful to have as an external representation; it has many benefits, because you can write it down, you can externalize it, and once it's outside of your mind, you free up space in your mind to think about other things, to consider other dimensions apart from those five.

External representations help you to expand the memory, the working memory that you have to think about strategy. Visuals in general, in strategy, are typical external representations. They play a very important role also because strategy usually involves multiple people, so you want everybody to be on the same page. A great way of doing that is by having a visual so that we all see the same.

So we have internal—what's in your mind; external—what you can draw, essentially, in strategy. And then there are distributed representations, where multiple people—and now with AI, artifacts and software—among all of them, they share the whole representation, so they have parts of the representation. Then you need to aggregate those parts—partial representations; some of them can be internal, some of them are external, but they are aggregated in a given way. So representations are really core in strategic decision making. All strategic decisions come from a given set of representations.

Ross Dawson: Yeah, that's fantastic. So looking at—so again, so much to dive into—but thinking about the visual representations, again, this is a core interest of mine. Can you talk a little bit about how AI can assist? There's an iterative process. Of course, visualization can be quite simple—a simple framework—or visuals can provide metaphors. There are wonderful strategy roadmaps which are laid out visually, and so on.

So what are the ways in which you see AI being able to assist in that, both in the two-way process of the human being able to make their mental model explicit in a visualization, and the visualization being able to inform the internal representation of the strategist? Are there any particular ways you've seen AI be useful in that context?

Felipe Csaszar: So I was very intrigued—as soon as LLMs became popular, were launched—yeah, ChatGPT, that was in November 2022—I started thinking, there are so many ways in which this could be used. So myself and two co-authors, Hyunjin Kim and Harsh Ketkar, we wrote a paper, one of the initial papers on how AI can be used in strategy. It's published in Strategy Science, and in that paper, we explore many ways in which AI could be used in strategy.

Of course, you can ask AI about coming up with answers to questions that you may have. You can also use AI to use any of these frameworks that have been developed in strategy. It was very clear to us that it was usable. Then the question was, how good are those uses? What's the quality of current AI doing this type of task?

So what we did is an experiment where we compared the performance of AI to the performance of humans. In strategy, there are two types of tasks: one is to generate alternatives, and the other is to select alternatives. You have a problem—the first thing you want to do is have possible solutions, and then you want to be able to pick the best out of those. So we had two experiments: one where we measured the ability of AI to generate alternatives, another to select.

For generation, what we did is we got data from a business plan competition where people were applying with business plans that all had the same format. The important thing is that the first paragraph of that application had the problem—a problem that they thought was important. So we took all of those applications and removed everything except for the problem, and then we gave that problem to an AI and asked the AI, "Hey, complete the rest of the business plan." So now we have business plans that are real, and the AI twins of those—business plans created by an AI that try to solve the same problem. Then we put both in a kind of business plan competition, where we had people with experience in investments ranking all of these business plans, and they didn't know which ones were created by humans and which ones were created by AIs.

We looked at their evaluations at the end of the day, and on average, the ones that were generated by the AI were ranked a little bit higher—7% higher—than the ones that were generated by humans. So at least in this very specific context of business plan competitions, there's potential. We're saying, hey, AI could generate things at a level that is comparable to the people applying to this type of business plan competition. That has a lot of potential. We could use it in different ways.

The other part of this study was to measure the ability of AI to select strategies among strategies. There, what we did is use data from another business plan competition, where all of the business plans had been evaluated by venture capitalists according to 10 dimensions: how strong is the idea, how strong is the team, how strong is the technology, etc. Then we gave an AI the same rubric that the venture capitalists received and asked the AI to rank or grade each one of these startups according to these 10 dimensions. Then we compared how similar the evaluations of the LLM were to the evaluations of the venture capitalists, and we showed that they are quite similar—there's a correlation of 52%. This, again, tells us that there is potential here.

An AI could do things that are quite similar to an experienced human evaluating this type of startup. A very interesting result there is that the correlation between two venture capitalists is lower than that 52%. So if you want to predict what a venture capitalist is going to say about your business, you're better off asking an LLM than asking another venture capitalist.

Ross Dawson: Yes, which perhaps shows the broad distribution of VC opinions. So obviously, LLMs can play valuable roles in many aspects of the strategy process, but this brings us back to the humans plus AI role. There are many—again, a big topic—but rather than looking at them, comparing what humans and AI did, where do you see the primary opportunities for humans and AI to collaborate in the strategy process?

Felipe Csaszar: Yeah, yeah. So I think that's a fascinating question, and my guess is that the study of the strategy process will completely change in the next 10 to 20 years. So far, all of the strategy process has been to study what happens when you have multiple people making strategy decisions. In the past, we studied things like devil's advocate, or we have studied the role of changing the size of the group of people making decisions, or the consensus level required. But in the future, there will be AIs in this process that will have completely different bounds or capacities than humans. So we will need to learn what's the best way of collaborating with them and including them into the strategic decision making process.

Today, we don't know much about it. We are beginning to learn things, like the study I mentioned—hey, in this task, it seems to be better—but there's so much that we need to learn. I am working on some things, but it's still early.

Ross Dawson: Going back to the distributed representation—this is something where, of course, distributed representation can be in multiple people. Arguably, it can include human and AI agents as each having different representations. But this goes, of course, to the aggregation piece, where the aggregation is—you have a board of directors, group of executives, potentially a participative strategy process bringing more people into the organization.

What are the specific roles of AI in assisting or facilitating effective aggregation to form a cohesive strategy?

Felipe Csaszar: Yeah, so the truth is, we yet don't know. There's not enough research. We're starting to think about it. We can see many uses, and I think what people should be doing now is running experiments to see when those add value and when they don't. It will be different for different companies in different industries, so probably there's no one solution that's the same for everybody.

For example, one possible use in strategic decision making is predicting what your competitors would do. If I do this, what would be the most likely reaction of my competitor? That's one. Another one is predicting consumers: if I launch this product with this set of characteristics, what would be the most likely response of my consumers? In strategy, something that has been very popular for the last 20 years is something called the Blue Ocean Strategy, which is a method to come up with new offerings, with new value propositions, but that requires a lot of creativity. With AI, you can automate part of that. At the end of the day, it's a search process. You have to think about what would happen if I add this, or if I add this other thing, or if I increase this. Part of that can be automated—that would be another use.

Or if you have different proposals—in this other study, we show, hey, AI is good at evaluating, so if you have the right rubric, this can automate the evaluation, or can automate the first part of that evaluation so that you only have to spend your time among the really complicated, more sophisticated decisions or alternatives. There are many, many things that can be done at this point.

Ross Dawson: Which goes to, I think, one of the interesting points in your work—representational complexity. Some strategies are arguably simple; other strategies, you can call them more sophisticated, but they are more complex. The representation of complexity is greater.

There are two things that are required for that. One is, of course, sophisticated thinking, but also, because strategy in any organization involves multiple people, it requires that there is an ability for a number of people together to hold a hopefully similar or very similar representation of a quite complex topic. What are ways in which AI can be used to enhance that development of more sophisticated or nuanced or complex representations that can support a better strategy?

Felipe Csaszar: So that's a great point. I have a paper from before this new round of AI called exactly that—representation complexity. There has been a long-standing discussion in strategy of when you want to use a simple representation, whether it's better to use a complex representation, or something in between. We tried to clarify when each one of these applies.

But then came this new round of AI, and I think it changes things a lot. I talk a little bit about this in a chapter I uploaded recently—it's called "Unbounding Rationality." The key thing there is that humans—we have our own computer here, it's the brain, and the brain has some constraints. One very important for strategy is the capacity of our working memory. There's this famous paper from the 1950s called "The Magical Number Seven," that we can hold in our working memory seven plus or minus two items—so between five and nine things we can keep at the same time in our mind. That's why, for example, I think all strategy frameworks are very simple. There's the five forces—fits within our working memory—or these typical two by twos, they have four quadrants—fits within our working memory.

But AIs don't have that bound. They are not constrained by the same working memory constraint that we have. So I would expect that future frameworks will be much more complex, that representational complexity will increase because of AI. Of course, frameworks of the future won't have a million things, because when you put too many things, you're overfitting—it works well with things that happened in the past, but not in the future—but they will probably have more than five things.

Also, another reason for not having a million things inside a framework is that at the end of the day, you will still need to communicate frameworks. You will need to convince the other people in the organization, the ones that are implementing the strategy, that this is the right strategy. You will need to convince them, so you don't want to have something that's extremely complex. But my guess would be that the complexity of frameworks and of strategies will increase with AI.

Ross Dawson: So looking forward—you talked about 10 or 20 years. If we see the current pace of capability development of LLMs on a similar trajectory, where do you see the remaining role of humans as a complement to AI in shaping strategy? I think you mentioned this possibility of essentially AI forming strategy, but I think for a wide array of reasons, it will be human plus AI—humans will play a role as final decision maker or other things. So where do you see those fundamental human capabilities still being retained for the foreseeable future, as a complement to AI in strategy?

Felipe Csaszar: So I think that for the next 10, 20, maybe 30 years, humans will be really busy coming up with how to use AI—all of these experiments that we mentioned, people will be running all of those things in all different industries, and that takes a while. That will require human ingenuity and trying things and really understanding strategy and understanding the capabilities of AI. So I don't see AI replacing human strategists in the very short term. On the contrary, because of AI, strategists will be more busy finding what are the best ways of using AI in their businesses.

I think 10, 20, or 30 years is very reasonable. If you think about the previous technological revolution, which I could say was the Internet—the technology for the Internet, we could say, existed since around '94. The World Wide Web is from '94, browsers are from '94, bandwidth enough to send email. Essentially all of the technology that supports internet business today was mostly in place in the mid to late '90s. But the businesses, or people, ended up using all of those things 10 or 20 years after that, because it takes a long time for people, for strategists, to come up with the idea—for someone to come up with the idea of, let's say, Netflix or eBay or PayPal or Facebook—all of those things, they take time for people to understand this is doable. Then it takes time to implement. Then it takes time for users to say, "Hey, this is useful." There's a lot of adaptation, and then there will be regulation. So the whole process takes a long time. I don't think that businesses will change from one day to the next. It will be a relatively slow process that will take decades. When we look back in 20 years from now, we will see, "Hey, everything changed," but every year we will see just a little bit of change, like what happened with the Internet. So I imagine that people designing strategies, implementing strategies, they will be very busy in the next 20 years.

Ross Dawson: So to round out, I won't ask you to make predictions, but maybe some hypotheses. What do you think are some interesting hypotheses that will inform your research—not just next year, but in the years beyond? Where do you think are the interesting avenues that we should be not just exploring and researching, but where there is a valid and useful hypothesis?

Felipe Csaszar: Yeah, so many things, but one very important—I think that strategy will be more about making the right predictions. The role of foresight. It turns out that when you want to train a machine learning algorithm, you need to have some signal that informs how you train the system. It's called the gradient, or the objective function. So in strategy, we will need to make that more central, and then think, what are the best ways in which you can use AI to make the right predictions? That requires measuring the quality of predictions. So you change this in the business, and this ends up happening. We want an AI to be able to do that. So coming up with ways in which you can measure the quality of decisions will become more important, so that we can train those AIs.

That's one. And very related to that is, well, the thing that's generating the predictions are representations, and then it's coming up with those more complex representations that are better at making decisions or are better at discovering things that are hard for humans to discover. Those are the two main things. I think the future of strategy will be about finding ways of improving foresight and finding ways of improving the thing that creates that foresight, which are the representations. All of that will change what has been called the strategy process—how we make decisions in strategy.

Ross Dawson: So I just need to pick up on that point around prediction. One of the challenges with external predictions is that, then, as a strategist, you have to say, either I will build my strategy based on that prediction, or I question that prediction. I think there are alternatives or attribute probabilities to it. So even if a prediction machine gets better, it's still very challenging, particularly cognitively, in terms of accountability for the strategist to incorporate a prediction where you don't necessarily have all of the logic behind the prediction as a machine learning model to incorporate. So how can a strategist incorporate what may be a relatively black box prediction into an effective strategy?

Felipe Csaszar: Yeah, well, and here we are in the conjecture part of this interview. So my answer is in that spirit. I think there are two ways out of this. One is that we will ask for explainable predictions. There's a whole area of AI called Explainable AI, which is exactly trying to do this—not just say what's the best prediction, but why the AI is saying that's the right prediction. So that could develop, and probably that will develop, because humans will question whatever the AI will predict. That's one way.

The other is, imagine that the AI becomes very, very, very good at making predictions. Then at some point, it doesn't matter if it can explain it or not—it's just making very good predictions. It's like, imagine you want to win at chess and you have this machine that can play chess very well. This machine wins at chess. You don't need to exactly understand how that machine is making each one of those decisions. But if the machine is very good at it, and it's consistently good at it, people will use it. In a sense, the market will decide. If this works better than a machine that provides an explanation for each one of the steps, people will just go with the one that's making the right prediction.

Ross Dawson: I think there's all sorts of other places we can go to from there, but that's fascinating. So where can people go to find out more about your work?

Felipe Csaszar: Well, I upload all of my stuff to SSRN. So if you Google my name and SSRN, you will find all of my papers. In the near future, like in the next three months or so, I'll have two things coming out. One is a Handbook of AI, written also with my co-editor Nan Jia from USC, that will have 20 chapters that will explore different ways in which AI will be affecting strategies—the Handbook of AI and Strategy, published by Elgar. And then around that same time, there will be a special issue of the Strategy Science journal where I'm one of the co-editors, which will be exactly about the same—about AI and strategic decision making. We already have accepted several of the papers for that special issue. Those papers will be pushing the frontier of what we know about AI and strategic decision making.

Ross Dawson: That's fantastic. I will certainly be following your work—very highly aligned with the humans plus AI movement. And thank you for all of the wonderful research and work you're doing.

Felipe Csaszar: Thank you so much, Ross. It's been a pleasure.

The post Felipe Csaszar on AI in strategy, AI evaluations of startups, improving foresight, and distributed representations of strategy (HAI Ep32) appeared first on Humans + AI.

"In this next era, the key to leadership will be blending systems thinking and AI automation—at least being aware of what you can do with it—with empathy, discernment, connection, and clarity.”

– Lavinia Iosub

Lavinia Iosub is the Founder of Livit Hub Bali, which has been named as one of Asia’s Best Workplaces, and Remote Skills Academy, which has enabled 40,000+ youths globally to develop digital and remote work skills. She has been named a Top 50 Remote Innovator, a Top Voice in Asia Pacific on the future of work, with her work featured in the Washington Post, CNET, and other major media.

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Ross Dawson: Lavinia, it is awesome to have you on the show.

Lavinia Iosub: Thank you so much for having me, Ross.

Ross Dawson: Well, we've been planning it for a long time. We've had lots of conversations about interesting stuff. So let's do something to share with the world.

Lavinia Iosub: Let's do it.

Ross Dawson: So you run a very interesting organization, and you are a leader who is bringing AI into your work and that of your team, and more generally, providing AI skills to many people. I just want to start from that point—your role as a leader of a diverse, interesting organization or set of organizations. What do you see as the role of AI for you to assist you in being an effective leader?

Lavinia Iosub: Great question. I think that the two of us initially met through the AI in Strategic Decision Making course, right? So I would say that's actually probably one of the top uses for me, or one of the areas where I found it very useful. The most important thing here is to not start with the mindset that AI will make any worthy decisions for you, but that it will augment your cognition and your decision making when you are feeding it the right context, the right master prompts, the right information about your business, your values, what you're trying to achieve, how you normally make decisions, and so on.

Then you work with it, have a conversation with it, and even build an advisory board of different kinds of AI personas that may disagree or have slightly different views. So it enhances your thinking, rather than serving you decisions on a plate that you don't know where they come from or what they're based on. That's one of the things that's been really interesting for me to explore.

If we zoom out a little bit, I think a lot of people think of AI as a way of doing the things they don't want to do. I think of AI as a way to do more of the things I've always wanted to do—delegate some menial, drudgery work that no human should be doing in the year of our Lord 2025 anymore, and do more of the creative, strategic projects or activities that many of us who have been in what we call knowledge work—which, to me, is not a good term for 2025 anymore, but let's call it knowledge work for now—just being able to do more of the things you've always wanted to do, probably as an entrepreneur, as a leader, as a creative person, or, for lack of a better word, a knowledge worker.

Ross Dawson: Lots to dig into there. One of the things is, of course, as a leader, you have decisions to make, and you have input from AI, but you also have input from your team, from people, potentially customers or stakeholders. For your leadership team, how do you bring AI into the thinking or decision making in a way that is useful, and what's that journey been like of introducing these approaches where there are different responses from some of your team?

Lavinia Iosub: So we were, I'd say, fairly early AI adopters, and I have an approach where I really want to double down on working more with AI and giving more AI learning opportunities to those people who are interested, rather than forcing it on people who may not be interested. There are pros and cons to that approach—it can create inequality and so on—but I'm much more about giving willing people more opportunity, more chances, and more learning, rather than evangelizing AI. People need to decide their own take towards AI and then engage with that and go after opportunities.

As a team, as a company, we were early AI adopters, and as a leadership team, quite a few quarters ago, we actually went through the Anthropic AI Fluency course as a team, and then produced practical projects that were shared with each other. We got certificates, which was the least important thing, but we shared learnings and it sparked a lot of interesting conversations and different uses for AI.

Now, you also probably know that we've been running an AI L&D challenge for two years now, where, as a team, we explore AI tools and share mini demos with each other. For example, "I'd heard a lot about this tool, I tried it out, here's what it looks like, here's a screen share, and my verdict is I'm going to use this," or maybe another person in the team finds it more useful. We found those exchanges to be really great for sparking ideas, not only about AI, but about our work in general. Because in the end, AI is a tool—it's not the end purpose of anything. It's a tool to do better work, more exciting work, double down on our human leverage, and so on.

We're now running this challenge for the second year straight, and we've actually allowed externals to join in. It's really interesting because it adds to the community spirit, seeing people from other areas of business and with different jobs, and seeing what they do with it. I think, and you may agree, Ross, that people think we're in an AI bubble, but we're still very much in an LLM bubble. When people say AI, 90% of them actually mean LLMs and ChatGPT. So it's interesting to see what others do.

With the challenge, we've said every week you have to try different tools. You can't just say, "Here's the prompt I'm doing this week on ChatGPT." No, it has to be different tools that do different things. It can be dabbling into agents, automating, or using some other AI tool that helps with your tasks. It can't just be showing us your ChatGPT conversations or how it drafts your emails. We want to take it a step further.

It's really helped us reflect on our own thinking and workflows and share with each other. It's almost been like team building as well. For example, I was exploring a tool for optimizing—basically, geo, switching from SEO to geo, and seeing what prompts your company comes up in, and so on. It was pure curiosity, and now I'm having a whole conversation with our marketing manager about that, that I probably wouldn't have had if we weren't doing that.

Again, I describe myself as AI fluent but very much people-centered. To me it's always, the goal is not AI fluency or AI use. The goal is, how do we work better with each other as humans, and do more of the work that excites us and provides value to our stakeholders? All those different things definitely help with that.

Ross Dawson: Yeah, well, it obviously goes completely to the humans plus AI thesis. I think the nature of leadership—there are some aspects that don't change, like integrity, presence, being able to share a vision, and so on. But do you think there are any aspects of what it takes to be an effective leader today that change, evolve, or highlight different facets of leadership as we enter this new age?

Lavinia Iosub: I would say so. If we think of the different eras of leadership and what it took to be efficient—well, I don't want to go into the whole leader versus manager debate—but when you look at the leaders who were succeeding in the 50s, there was a command and control model, certain ways of doing things, and it was largely male, especially in corporate leadership. That went through some transformations over the last few decades, and I think what's happening right now with AI will trigger, or perhaps augment, another transformation.

In this next era, the key to leadership will be blending systems thinking and AI automation—at least being aware of what you can do with it—with empathy, discernment, connection, and clarity. Sorry, just needed a sip of water.

Secondly, for a very long time, when we talk about knowledge work, the biggest competitive advantage has been talent—who you can attract to your team or company. Technology, money, all these things were important, but they were also quite accessible if you had a good idea and good people. So much depended on who you could attract, so it was a lot about talent, or what we otherwise call human resources.

Right now, we're evolving into an era where it's becoming about—I've tried to coin a term to make it easy to understand—people and AI resources, or PAIR. It's a good acronym because it's a pair: two different types of resources, people and AI, that have to work together. The most important thing, which I don't see enough talk about, is not only about these two resources, but crucially, the quality of connection between them. How do you make them work together?

We've seen, and you and I know well, these now-famous cases of corporations that fired their entire CS department and made AI do it, and then the clients were all upset, it wasn't working, and they had to bring the people back. Now you've got people who are laid off and disgruntled, and a botched AI implementation. So now you have a whole other problem.

When you hear of cases like that, what's really obvious is that there was no connection between that pair of resources—people and AI. Depending on the industry—some are more conservative and will take a while to implement these things, others are faster—but the measure of success in leadership will be about how you understand what's going on in AI and automation, what's happening with people, how they're concerned about their jobs, how that's changing the psychological contract between employee and employer, and actually manage that situation so all these things blend and work together. And basically organizational design: how do you make all the resources you have work together to do the thing your trying to do. Whatever it is in your organization.

Ross Dawson: Very interesting. So talent is still critically important. My thesis is actually that talent is even more important than ever, but the nature of that talent is changing, as you said. As we talk about how leadership changes, the nature of talent also changes. It's your ability to work with others, including AI.

We used to have this syndrome in professional firms, or in many firms, where you had team players and solo players. The solo players, if they did well, that was okay even if they couldn't collaborate. But now we've seen a lot of research showing that the ability to collaborate with humans, the ability to lead humans, is highly correlated to the ability to collaborate with AI and to lead AI or AI agents. So talent is still critical; it's just that instead of raw intelligence, more and more we're heightening the aspect of being able to work with other intelligences—human and other.

Lavinia Iosub: Absolutely, I fully agree with that, and that's why "P" as in people still comes first in my acronym. People resources—human resources—although I don't like the term "human resources" so much because HR has been trivialized and even disliked in some organizations. But people are very much the ones at the core.

I believe one of the skills of the future—and when I say the future, I mean 2030, just a few years from now—is AI orchestration. At the core of that will still be a human who does this AI orchestration. It's important to resource your people with the right tools and access to technology, because AI reshapes opportunity, access, hierarchies, career progression, and all these things. We can't ignore it and hope for the best, but at the core, it's still humans. Investing in humans and augmenting them with AI is probably the way to go for many of us. That can mean small integrations and augmentations depending on the job, or it can mean that maybe now 80% of the job is done by machines, but the remaining 20% is crucial.

Ross Dawson: This goes to what you were saying earlier about knowledge work perhaps not being the best term to describe what is valued today. Building on what you've just been saying, what comes next? How do we describe the valued worker in this new era? What are their characteristics?

Lavinia Iosub: I really think it's really hard to overstate just how much of our world is built on the idea of knowledge being a scarce resource. When you think of LinkedIn—the entirety of LinkedIn is based on knowledge as a scarce resource: "I did this course, I have this degree," and so on. The entire recruitment process in most organizations is based on the idea of knowledge being scarce, and all of that is collapsing right now. AI models are swallowing entire fields overnight. If we sit here silent for 20 seconds, we can probably hear the AI churning through 20 years' worth of specialized knowledge in any field.

So knowledge is becoming a lot less important. Accumulating knowledge, especially hoarding knowledge—in a lot of larger corporations, you see this behavior because knowledge is access to power and authority. People had the right incentives to hoard knowledge, but that's switching. There are diminishing returns to accumulating and hoarding knowledge, and accelerating returns to skills. Some of these, I'm saying "skills" in quotation marks, because they haven't been regarded as skills for a long time—like curiosity, for example. That's a really important skill that I personally want to see in anyone joining our teams, because we're building the car as we're driving it. We can't rely on degrees or previous knowledge. People being curious and having a mindset of continuous learning, unlearning, and relearning is absolutely key. Being comfortable with that, being comfortable with being proven wrong—like, this was the best tool yesterday, now it's a new day, a new week, there's another tool, and you can't be attached to what you were doing before.

You need to get into a beginner's mindset and start from scratch again. Discernment and things like taste and perspective—these are things that AI can help with but cannot fully form. This is where the value of lived experience is still going to be a competitive advantage for a while. Sometimes I watch really young people interacting with AI, and they don't know how to curate, how to ask the hard questions, how to play devil's advocate, or look at what it's producing, because they don't have that real-world experience.

In the humans plus AI community, there's a big debate about junior jobs, mentorship, and all those things. This is where mentorship and watching more experienced people interact with hard problems and do their job is still going to be important for a while, because AI can only tell you what you ask it. If you don't know what to ask, you're not going to get it right. So things like discernment, taste, perspective—which come from lived experiences, connecting dots, and so on—are very important already.

Interestingly, emotional awareness and clarity will be very important as well. One of the reasons for that is the fact that right now, we have so much more speed for execution. I was watching a video the other day, accompanied by my AI assistant, about a guy who has created 24 startups with zero human employees. He's basically created AIs that look into what's missing in the market and create a product or service to meet that demand. The speed of execution for him is so fast. So instead of acting on impulse, being able to have the right discernment, emotional clarity, and so on to actually direct the AI—to orchestrate the AI, as we were mentioning—can probably save a lot of time and money, because the speed of execution is now so fast.

Before, if you took the wrong decision, especially in corporate, you could spend a few months executing 5% on it, get lost in bureaucracy, maybe it never happened, and you had a lot of chances to pull it back. Now, by tomorrow, you can have a working app, a whole business, a whole startup. So these things around clarity of decision making, taste, perspective, discernment, and so on become very important, because we can very quickly go in the wrong direction and find ourselves much further in the process than before, to correct course. If that makes sense.

Ross Dawson: I think there are a few different categories and ways. Curiosity is an attitude or propensity, which we can foster, but it is kind of a mindset. There are a number of these things that are just our attitude to the world or our mindset. Taste—a lot of people talk about taste as a real critical differentiator, and it's interesting to compare the words judgment and taste. Judgment and taste are obviously closely related, but taste is more aesthetic—"this is beautiful"—as opposed to "this is right" or "this is a better assessment." Judgment is still critical relative to AI. As you were saying, we need to be able to discern whether the AI is coming up with something useful or not, and judgment is a critical aspect of being able to be the pair—the people working with the AI.

That aspect of taste is interesting. Some people do have better taste than others; there are designers who get called for that work. But again, I think this is something we can foster and evoke. I think the set of capabilities you ran through are critically important.

But I do want to hop on to the Remote Skills Academy. I'd love for you to talk about what that is, where you are in that journey, and what you've learned—what are the lessons learned in bringing this to life?

Lavinia Iosub: Thanks for asking. The Remote Skills Academy is actually a project that was born at the beginning of the pandemic. For wider context, I run Livit, which is a support ecosystem for entrepreneurs, startups, and remote workers to do amazing, disruptive work in terms of their businesses, careers, ventures, whatever it is they're working on. We do that in a variety of ways. We were very busy with that, but we also incubate internally—we keep tinkering with different products, projects, and services that sometimes turn into their own ventures.

The Remote Skills Academy emerged at the beginning of the pandemic. I had been thinking about it for a while, but it was a moment where that sort of project was highly needed. I live in Bali for most of the year, and at the beginning of the pandemic, on an island that depends pretty much 90% on tourism, you can imagine all the jobs disappeared. Everyone was like, "Okay, what are we going to do now?" because we depend on physical jobs within perhaps a few kilometers around us.

For a long time, we had been building remote-capable teams and working digitally ourselves. Before it was cool, we were a bunch of weirdos. Now everyone knows about remote work, knows it's possible, and everyone has an opinion about it, with return-to-office mandates and so on.

But the world has proven we can do that, right? We can work remotely and keep the world running a largely remotely, obviously with some notable exceptions in critical infrastructure, but professional services are largely remote-capable. We had been doing that for a long time, and we thought, "Okay, we're building digital projects, working remotely with clients and team members from all around the world. How do we take what we know and make it more accessible to more people?" Perhaps people who are losing their jobs in tourism, or people who want to work from home for whatever reason, across Indonesia or elsewhere.

We had no idea what we were doing, to be honest. We just knew that you can work digitally and remotely. We thought, "Okay, how do we teach this and open a world of opportunity to people?" We started very small with a cohort of 20 people. It was very quickly, in a couple of days, oversubscribed, which was a clear signal that there was a huge need. I think I spent $10 on Facebook ads that I managed myself, so it probably wasn't even very well managed. Then we were like, "Okay, close the gates, because we don't even know what we're doing, so we don't want more than"—it was 23 people at the time.

We said, "Let's teach people basic digital remote work skills and see what they can do with that," not in a way where we're promising anyone—maybe a non-techie—that they're going to be a senior Python developer in three weeks, but in a way that just opens up a little bit of opportunity online, perhaps in virtual assistant jobs, community management, digital marketing, project management, and so on.

Long story short, we're five and a half, almost six years in now. We have helped upskill 25,000 learners across three continents, a majority of them in Indonesia—about 95%. We've had partnerships with other countries and communities and opened it up to places like Thailand, Rwanda, Hungary and so on, but the majority has happened in Indonesia, and we're pretty much fully focused on the market here.

Ross Dawson: Just pulling that to the present—so it's been five and a half years now, and we've had the rise of generative AI, which obviously makes it very different now. As you say, it's not as if you're going to make people into developers, but presumably one of the key things you're teaching now is how, as a remote worker across any domain, you apply AI to be a more effective freelancer. What specific skills are you teaching in order to help these freelancers to able to work well remotely?

Lavinia Iosub: Actually, it's not only freelancers. This year, we have offered AI upskilling to 10,000 people alone—specifically AI upskilling. Some of those people have been freelancers, some have been job seekers or students wanting to increase their chances of getting a job, and some have been, for example, tourism sector workers or small business owners. We've widened the scope, because even if you're a small business owner with a physical business, it still helps to have AI skills and digital skills generally, but specifically AI skills.

Just being able to, for example, know how to prompt an LLM beyond "draft my emails"—what else can you do with it? For example, something I'm working on for a session tonight is quick demos on how you can use it in project management. I'll show how you can record yourself talking about a project you want to outline, then have an LLM put that in a structured format as guidelines for your team, and then use something like Manus AI—other tools do it well, but I find Manus does it better—to turn that into a Trello board, a Monday board, a Gantt chart, a timeline, and everything. Even if what you do is partially or mostly in person, it can still help to be able to do these things, and you can use free tools for it.

So it's going beyond freelancers, online business owners, or remote workers. I believe we've got about two years until AI will fundamentally change the way we interact with the world. I don't want to hazard myself to predictions, but I think when we look at the speed of AI adoption—that has been so much faster than Google or anything else, even simpler tools—and it's now exponentially faster, I believe a majority of the world will be using or at least affected by AI. So it's becoming much wider than freelancers, remote workers, or digital businesses. A tourism sector worker or a physical business owner has a lot to gain from being able to find their way around those kind of things.

In Indonesia, for example, a lot of business is carried out via WhatsApp. A lot of people just record voice messages, then feed that to an AI to turn it into documentation, project structure, organizational knowledge, a whole project management board, or whatever is.

Ross Dawson: That's fantastic. So where can people go to find out more about your work and your companies.

Lavinia Iosub: I think we can link in the episode notes—a LinkedIn profile is probably a great way to connect with me, and the websites liv.it and remoteskills.academy are where we share a lot about what we do, as well as through socials. I'd love to connect with your listeners. We're always open to ideas, partnerships, and so on.

Ross Dawson: That's fantastic. Love what you're doing Lavinia. Thanks so much what you're doing and for sharing today.

Lavinia Iosub: And likewise, thank you for what you're doing, and the amazing Humans Plus AI community that I recommend everyone to join if they can, and the fantastic podcast that I'm very honored to be on. Thank you.

The post Lavinia Iosub on AI in leadership, People & AI Resources (PAIR), AI upskilling, and developing remote skills (HAI Ep31) appeared first on Humans + AI.

"What we're seeing now is that when we think about some of the friction and challenges of adoption, this isn't a technology issue, per se. This is a people opportunity."

–Jeremy Korst

Jeremy Korst is Founder & CEO of Mindspan Labs and Partner and former President of GBK Collective. He lectures at Columbia Business School, The Wharton School, and USC, and is co-author of the Wharton + GBK annual Enterprise AI Adoption Study, one of the most cited sources on how businesses are actually using AI. Jeremy also publishing widely in outlets such as Harvard Business Review on strategy and innovation.

Website:

mindspanlabs.ai

Accountable Acceleration:

LinkedIn Profile:

Jeremy Korst

Ross Dawson: Jeremy, it's wonderful to have you on the show.

Jeremy Korst: Yeah, hey, thanks for having me.

Ross Dawson: So you, I think it's pretty fair to say you are across enterprise AI adoption, being the recent co-author of a report with Wharton and GbK Collective on where we are with enterprise AI adoption. So what's the big picture?

Jeremy Korst: Yeah, let me start—now that I've reached this stage in life, in my career, and I look back over what I've done the last couple decades, it's actually been at the intersection of technology adoption and innovation. I spent a couple of careers at Microsoft, most recently leading the launch of Windows 10 globally. I worked at T-Mobile, led several businesses there, and more recently, have been spending time really with three things.

One is through my consulting company, GbK Collective, working with some of the world's largest brands on market research and strategies for consumers and products, working with academic partners who are core to that work we do at GbK—so leading professors from Harvard and Wharton and Kellogg, and you name it—but then also very active in the early stage community, where I'm an advisor and board member of several of those.

And so I've had this bit of a triangle to be able to watch technology adoption unveil both inside and outside the organization, whether it's inside the organization, how people are using it and effectively, or outside, how it's being taken to market. So fast forward to where we're at with Gen AI. It's been fascinating to me, because all of those things are happening and all of those communities. Where we started with the Wharton report was three years ago. Stefano and Tony, one of the co-authors, and I were literally just having a conversation right after the launch of ChatGPT. And of course, there were all the headlines and all these predictions about what was going to happen and what could happen. And we said, well, wait a minute, why don't we actually track what actually happens?

And so therein started the three-year program. It's now an annual program sponsored by the Wharton School, conducted by GbK—my research company—that looks specifically at US enterprise business leader adoption. We decided to focus on that audience because we believe they were going to be some of the most influential decision makers around budgets and strategies as this unfolded, so that's been our focus. We're now in our third year, and there's lots to dig into.

Ross Dawson: So the headline for this year's report was "accountable acceleration," and I've got to say that that phrase sounds a lot more positive than what a lot of other people are describing with Gen AI adoption. "Accountable" sounds good. "Acceleration" sounds good. So is that an accurate reflection?

Jeremy Korst: I think it is. And I'll say that, yeah, the Wharton School, with three co-authors—Sonny, Stefano, and myself—we all have a relatively positive perspective and perception of what is and could be the impact of Gen AI. Now, we don't try to dismiss some of the concerns and challenges. They're there, they're realistic, and should be considered, but we have a generally positive perspective going into this. As we've looked at the three years that we're at now, we've moved from the first couple of years, which were more around experimentation and maybe hype, to where we started seeing accountability—businesses really looking at this as a potential tool, not only to drive efficiencies across their businesses, but also perhaps new ways of growth.

For example, one of the things that we added this year, because we expected to find more of this accountability start to unfold, is we added ROI as a measure, for instance. And we were frankly surprised at the report level we saw of organizations reporting both that they were tracking ROI and that they were seeing indications of early positive ROI in that work. That's one of the areas that lends itself to the title, when we started to see some of that accountability start to come into play.

Ross Dawson: So one of the stats being, I think, 72% formally measure Gen AI ROI, and 74% report positive ROI, which is a bit higher than some other things.

Jeremy Korst: That's right. I'm glad you clearly read the report, thank you. We intentionally decided to take a broad measure of ROI at this stage of the adoption cycle. While we were sponsored by Wharton—I'm a Wharton grad, and I'm on the board at the Wharton School—we very much would love to have hard measures of ROI, and so we yearn for that. But at this stage of the adoption cycle, what's maybe even more important is the perception of business leaders on the returns and progress they're seeing on their initial investments, because that's how they're going to evaluate this next stage of investment as we start scaling across the enterprise.

Ross Dawson: So, one of those three themes, I guess, from the report—one was that usage is now mainstream, the other is this idea of getting measurement of value, and the other was digging into the human capital piece, where I think there are a number of interesting aspects. One is, I suppose, how leadership use of AI correlates with where positioned businesses stand. But also, well, first, let's dig in a little bit more into some of the other aspects of that. But at a high level, this is a Gen AI technology, but it's an implement of the organization with people. So it is more about people than technology, ultimately. What are some of the things which were highlighted for you in looking at the people aspect of change?

Jeremy Korst: Yeah, the people aspect has always been core to this work, and some of the work I do advising companies in this space. One of our co-authors, one of my HBR co-authors, Stefano Puntoni, is a social scientist who comes from a psychology background and has studied for his entire career the intersection of people and technology. I've been in the trenches, watching and learning about the intersection of people and technology from my roles. So this has been near and dear to our hearts.

As we suspected from the early days, and what has definitely unfolded, what we're seeing now is that when we think about some of the friction and challenges of adoption, this isn't a technology issue, per se. This is a people opportunity—from whether strategies are being translated effectively throughout the ranks into a vision, to some of the challenges middle managers are having. We'll talk about that here, because we found some of that in our study, or some of the real concerns that others have studied, like the Pew organization and others around workforce concerns, of course. So we've got this really interesting mix of hype and concern that translates itself across the adoption friction.

That's definitely been a lens that we've been trying to look at through our purview, to understand, particularly from a leadership perspective, what those perceptions and issues may be. For instance, one of the things that we've looked at for three years is how business leaders report that they believe Gen AI will either enhance or replace their employees' skills, and we're seeing a mix of both. But we're happy to see that consistently over the course of our three-year studies, now almost 90% of leaders are saying that they believe AI does and will enhance their employees' skills, while about 70% consistently have raised concerns—or not necessarily concerns, but say—that it will replace some employee skills.

This year, we had another question about skill atrophy. It's like, okay, so we understand that you have perceptions that this is going to enhance employee skills but maybe replace others. What's your worry about skill atrophy, about your employees' skill proficiency? And 43%, just under half of leaders, reported they were concerned about declines in employee proficiency. The takeaway there, and this becomes to me like a strategy and leadership opportunity, is this Goldilocks issue. Yes, it can enhance and replace certain skills, and leadership for a given organization needs to be really crystal clear about what skills it should replace versus which skills it won't. That's one of the things we talk about a lot in our advisory and other work as well because of this type of dynamic.

Ross Dawson: Yeah. Well, if you take those stats—89% seeing the potential for augmentation, 70-odd percent saying it can replace skills, and 43% saying that it can erode skills—well, there's obviously quite a few that answered yes to all three of them, which is true?

Jeremy Korst: Exactly. That's getting it right. And this is where, fast forward, this section too, is the need for leadership. We're seeing a rising need in this age of AI—not only people with AI skill sets, per se, but also change management and strategic leadership skills that can help evaluate these situations and make choices, be choiceful around, "Hey, AI could perhaps replace some of these skills within my team or within my workforce, but because of my strategy, because of the assets I need, I'm not going to let it," just as an example.

Ross Dawson: So, have you been able to see any AI implementation or adoption journeys or approaches or roadmap styles that have been more effective than others, or anything you'd be able to pick out around what has really been correlated to a positive adoption, flowing through to value—to, obviously, financial value, but also to the organization?

Jeremy Korst: So I think what we've seen, or I've seen in the work in this space, is really a combination of top-down support with bottoms-up actual action. There needs to be a vision. The first thing to me is the organizations that have been able to at least translate their strategy into an AI vision. I'm carefully selecting my words there because I don't believe organizations need an AI strategy—hopefully they already have a strategy, and what AI is, is a really powerful tool to help them achieve that.

Once they've translated that such that leaders within the organization can look at that vision, understand the company strategy, say, "Okay, now I can translate that to my team," and a lot of teams we work with—in the marketing organization, marketing analytics, marketing research—can see, "Okay, I understand that now, and I also have leadership support for experimentation." Now, I'm going to work within my team, particularly early adopters on my team, and what I've seen being really successful is letting them loose—not just necessarily going out and experimenting with everything and just throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks, but more intentional experimentation. Saying, "Hey, based on strategy, based on that vision, based on what we need to get done in our organization, where do we think there are some quick wins that we can go out and execute?" That seems to work really well.

Of course, not all those things work, but when they do, getting the excitement within that team, where you start getting some kind of lighthouse examples of these wins that start making wildfire. I'll give you an example. I had a person in one of the startups I work with, who's on the sales side—he's a sales engineer, and so he was an early adopter. He's always been an early adopter, but we had the right strategy and vision and leadership support in place. Henry—actually wrote about Henry in my second-to-last HBR article—was an early adopter of Google Notebook. Henry went out for the team and built all these notebooks for personas that the company was focused on—this happened to be a cybersecurity startup, so enterprise cybersecurity personas—and the team started, well, after Henry demonstrated the use of this, Henry started using these personas to do sales pitches and get feedback on his sales pitch, on how he should change his language, how he should promote certain things, etc. He started getting really good, and so he started demonstrating out to the rest of the team. And it caught on like wildfire, because of that very basic experimentation in line with strategy and vision and then showing early success. That's an example.

Ross Dawson: So you're familiar, I think, with the broad "humans plus AI" thesis—as in, human-AI to augment humans, human first, but AI to be able to create a complement. Part of that obviously flows through that it's not just individuals using AI to augment them, but it changes essentially the way work is done inside organizations, where some tasks or skills are being replaced by AI, others are being augmented. Then it requires a new landscape of what may be described as redesigning work. That requires vision, in terms of being able to envision what that future stage for the organization might be, and the leadership to be able to guide that. What proportion, or where are you seeing the difference with those organizations that are deliberately and intentionally redesigning work, as opposed to just applying AI to their current organization?

Jeremy Korst: Yeah, we talk about this. I collaborate with another of my HBR co-authors, Olivier Toubia at Columbia. He has an AI for business class that I lecture in, and this is a topic we discuss in that class. The way you hit on it is that the first phase that we're still frankly dead in is bringing AI to work. So, how can we, within our existing processes and flows, use copilots, use other types of augmentation capabilities to make us more efficient and effective in our current workflows? We're still in the early stage of that adoption. The OpenAI report data came out and showed more of that type of adoption. Our report showed a lot of that productivity adoption, and frankly, there's a lot more to do there.

But what you hit on is, I think, some of the BCG and McKinsey work that shows that if we look at AI laggards versus AI leaders, it takes all kinds of different combinations of things. But one thing it definitely takes is around changing workflows and maybe even changing organizational design. This is more of the thinking—how to put AI to work for me, and what does it mean to have autonomous agents, what's the management and governance structure for that within a team? In our world, you and I talked previously about one of the recent papers we'd written about using digital twins and synthetic personas in the marketing research world, in the product development world. These approximations of human input not only have the promise to make existing workflows more efficient, but also dramatically change the workflows overall and add new workflows to the organization.

Frankly, the organizations that we're working with are really at early stages of that, and it's still much more in the experimentation phase, from what we've seen, versus scaled adoption of brand new workflows to take advantage of these technologies. But I will say, one of the other data points we saw this year is that 30% of the overall technology budget for AI for these organizations that we surveyed—over 800 business leaders—was in internal R&D. That's just an indication of the level of investment that organizations are starting to put to this notion of more specialized workflows, maybe more vertical solutions, but internally specialized systems is kind of what we're talking about.

Ross Dawson: So, I mean, you probably don't have the data on it yet, but do you have any hypotheses around what supports or is correlated with that redesign of work inside organizations? What are the front runners, what is enabling them to do that effectively? Because this is experimentation, because you are redesigning work, these are experiments. You can't know that it's going to work, and so it does require that mentality of experimentation, but you have to do it in order to be able to find the future structure and architecture of the organization. So is there anything which you have been seeing which gives any hints or clues as to what are promising pathways there?

Jeremy Korst: Well, I think part of it is, I'm a big believer in the technology adoption curve, which has been around since the mid-50s, popularized by Geoffrey Moore and "Crossing the Chasm." I've seen it both on internal organizational technology adoption and most definitely on the go-to-market side of technology adoption, and I think it plays out at the organizational level too. Those organizations that tend to be leaders in having a more entrepreneurial, experimental, intentional risk-taking type culture are going to be ahead of the game in this, because they're willing—and by the way, it's just natural, that's what we should expect—and other companies will take their lead, see the case studies, and those with lower risk tolerance will begin to adopt.

I think that's one of the reasons culture is so important—having a culture of early adoption, a little bit higher risk tolerance, and experimentation is super important. But also, and of course, the other thing we already talked about, which is having clear strategy and AI vision of how AI fits in that strategy, is imperative. But in between, we've got the middle management layer, and this is where some of our study this year—some findings came out around some of the disconnect between executive leadership and middle management. Things like in perception of ROI, where middle managers did not have as rosy a perception of current ROI versus executive VP-plus leaders. They also didn't have as optimistic a view on how their company stood compared to other companies on AI adoption—meaning, how far ahead they were on AI adoption. Executives tend to have a rosier picture of that; middle managers tended not.

This came across in several other factors. To me, you're not going to be able to have that organization that can be adaptive to the level that you and I were just talking about—about truly changing workflows, truly changing business models, being more innovative—if you don't have all of those components. The strategy-vision connection is clearly communicated, you already have a culture of experimentation, intentional experimentation, adoption, and then, most definitely, that middle leadership level that is all aligned and focused, empowered, and in line with all of those things.

Ross Dawson: So, you mentioned it a moment ago. You have this wonderful paper just out recently in Harvard Business Review on how Gen AI is transforming market research—basically saying, how does it change what's currently done, and how does it create new ways of doing stuff? One of the interesting things there is, you did a study in which more than 40% are saying they're already experimenting with digital twins. One of the questions is, of course, it's a lot easier to ask a digital twin than it is a human person, but it may not be exactly the same.

Jeremy Korst: Currently, that's what the survey would say. I do aspire to the day when I have my digital twin that can answer surveys on my behalf so I don't have to, but we're not there yet. We've been watching this area. Stefano and I, along with Olivier Toubia from Columbia—Olivier has been, in part, leading an initiative at Columbia that's an open source, public project that Columbia is invested in around digital twins. They have impaneled a couple thousand actual humans, and they've had a course of survey waves where they've collected a lot of real data—behavioral, all kinds of other survey data—and then been using those data to try to construct digital twins and understand their effectiveness, etc. It's been part of the work that we've been doing. He's been doing this and brought it into our HBR work.

We decided to look at the world of market research because several people predicted that this would be one of the most impacted, early-impacted areas that AI can bring both a combination of efficiency and value to. Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars—Lightspeed and Sequoia, Lightspeed and Andreessen rather, invest billions of dollars—in traditional market research. I've been a consumer and a provider of market research; it can be slow, expensive, and frustrating because organizations want more real-time insight. The promise of AI to deliver that is compelling.

I would say we're not there yet. What we're seeing in the Columbia work—we talk to a bunch of startups, talk to a bunch of venture capitalists, and of course practitioners on the brand side who are using this—it's all very, very early days. But the promise is there. What I hope, and I think I can speak for my co-authors as well, is that rather than replacing a bunch of market research—because if you're going to make a bet-the-business type decision, I know I would want to talk to some real people. I may hope my competitors don't, but I sure want to talk to some real people. But then I also know there's all kinds of decisions that are made within organizations today that, because of budget, timing, or otherwise, don't get the benefit of outside-in feedback. The decisions are made without having some of this feedback.

Where I'm excited about things like digital twins and synthetic personas is, how can we help inform the longer tail of product design, user experience, other types of strategy decisions that would otherwise not have had the opportunity to benefit from any outside feedback, or at least limited outside feedback, that this can perhaps now provide all kinds of additional insight into that process, versus replacing a bunch of the strategic work that companies, I think, really really need to do, need to invest in, and need to take the time to do thoroughly.

Ross Dawson: Yeah, I think that's—you know, it's not just market research. Across the board, Gen AI is able to enable things that would not otherwise have happened. That's very much the case with coding, where there's—how many software projects are happening now that never would have happened without Gen AI.

Jeremy Korst: Right now, spending the weekend, I've got Antigravity, I've got Codex, I've got Quadcode. I have never in my life—outside of my Commodore 64, I'm going to age myself, writing BASIC programs—I've been in technology most of my life, and I've never coded. I am now doing prototypes that, if I would have had this capability throughout my career, it's mind-boggling. So what you just touched on, to me, is so exciting about the ability for a non-engineer to be able to actually demonstrate their ideas and come up with new ideas—it's extremely powerful.

Ross Dawson: Yeah, yeah. I think that, you know—so just, you know, talk about Microsoft, talk about coding, but that's across the board. Another great example is healthcare advice in disadvantaged countries and regions, you know, where there's less in terms of possibilities.

Jeremy Korst: Healthcare advice in developed countries, where the GDP and cost is going up. The opportunity there is tremendous. So, yes.

Ross Dawson: So, but just going back to the market research—actually, just noticing that, you know, 40% currently use digital twins, 42% intend to soon. There was a study last year from a group at Stanford where they, I think, had two-hour interviews with people, and they managed to get some pretty—over 90%, if I recall—sort of correlation of responses to actual humans. But coming back to what was—so, you say, okay, they're not there yet. And yeah, we also will never get to the point where we don't bother to talk to people anymore. But what's it going to take to make these digital twins more valuable for this market research?

Jeremy Korst: Yeah, to some evidence, I think the Stanford study showed about 88%, and by the way, that's similar to what some of the Columbia work has done. Now, averages can be dangerous, so when we start dissecting that into what types of questions, from which audiences, etc., the numbers start declining in accuracy on many fronts. That's the work—like I said, it's entirely open source at Columbia. So the Columbia Digital Twins Project—I’d suggest anybody go out and read the research. The data are all available; you can play with it yourself, because Olivier and team are trying to advance this topic and thinking broadly versus proprietary models.

One of the challenges is around correlation variation. While we may be able to get some point estimates for a population that tend to have accuracy levels, when we start looking—particularly in marketing and product strategy—variance is extremely important. Trying to understand different populations and not only the average estimate, but what is the variance within that sample. This is where we're seeing, just as an example, digital twins having perhaps more of a challenge in trying to recreate actual human response.

Olivier is the statistician, so I'd have him speak much more eloquently about the true statistical science behind that, but from a decision-making perspective, for those things where perhaps, if we want to have an aggregate point estimate for a population, like we write about in the article, there is some that may be useful today to be able to use like that. But if we start trying to get into certain subsegments and trying to understand variation, that's where today, and the current technology, at least, needs some additional work. And by the way, that's where a lot of the decisions are made in the strategic world.

So we're optimistic about this, where it's going. Just also want to caution—with our clients we're working with on this, it's about experimentation. We very much recommend that organizations in the marketing research, product, UX world, etc., should be experimenting with these technologies, run them side by side with existing programs and existing surveys to test, map, and understand where they work and where they don't for that company's own individual needs. But in terms of broad scale scaling, you really need to take the right scenario, but you'd find that right scenario through that type of experimentation and evaluation, and we recommend.

Ross Dawson: So just to round out, coming back to the beginning about enterprise AI adoption—so this report, which was on 2025, was "accountable acceleration." So where does it go from here? What do you see? What do you hope for? What do you think is the pathway in how AI is used in organizations to create value in the coming year or two? That's already a long way.

Jeremy Korst: Yeah, right. Well, to me, it's a call to action to leadership today—leadership to make sure that there is that alignment of strategy and vision, that they're getting the middle management team on board, and moreover, being excited about this. I think organizations—and we're already seeing this happen with different CEOs announcing different things about, "Am I going to be an efficiency-focused organization, or am I going to be a growth-focused organization?"—help their organization understand which path they're taking, so that the rest of the organization can get behind them.

Then, as we look forward, some of the things that I'm excited to evaluate in the study and watch is the move from horizontal productivity and efficiency applications and use cases to more domain-specific and function-specific use cases. We're starting to see evidence of that in the study. We're expecting to see more of it next year. Particularly, like I said, we've seen some evidence of investments in internal R&D growing substantially, etc. Like we all yearn—at least, I can't speak for everybody, but a lot of us yearn—for true ROI measurement and evidence. I think we'll see that in the coming year and years. And overall, hopefully seeing some of these, evidence of companies—particularly perhaps smaller, nimble companies—that are able to do amazing things, new things they wouldn't have been able to do before with this potentially fantastic technology, be able to compete in new ways, deliver in new ways, etc.

Ross Dawson: Fantastic. Well, exciting times. It's nice that you're keeping on the pulse for all of us.

Jeremy Korst: I don't think any of us are on the full pulse, but I've at least got a little bit of a finger on it.

Ross Dawson: Thanks so much for your time and your insights, Jeremy. I'll be continuing to follow your reports and your work.

Jeremy Korst: All right. Thanks, Ross. Pleasure being on.

The post Jeremy Korst on the state of AI adoption, accountable acceleration, changing business models, and synthetic personas (HAI Ep30) appeared first on Humans + AI.

"Some of this that we've come across is even the identity shift that is necessary, because old identities served a pre-AI work environment, and you cannot go into a post-AI era with the old identities, mindsets, and behaviors.”

–Nikki Barua

Nikki Barua is a serial entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and bestselling author. She is currently Co-Founder of FlipWork, with her most recent book Beyond Barriers. Her awards include Entrepreneur of the Year by ACE, EY North America Entrepreneurial Winning Woman, Entrepreneur Magazine's 100 Most Influential Women, and many others.

Website:

nikkibarua.com

flipwork.ai

LinkedIn Profile:

Nikki Barua

Book:

Beyond Barriers

Ross Dawson: Nikki, it is wonderful to have you on the show.

Nikki Barua: Thanks for inviting me, Ross. I'm thrilled to be here.

Ross Dawson: You focus on reinvention. And I've always, always liked the phrase reinvention. I've done a lot of board workshops on innovation. And, you know, in a way, sort of all innovation—it's kind of like a very old word now.

And the thing is, it is about renewal. We always need to continually renew ourselves. We need to continually reinvent what has worked in the past to what can work in the future. So what are you seeing now when you are going out and helping organizations reinvent?

Nikki Barua: Well, first of all, reinvention is no longer optional. I think both of us have spent a large part of our careers helping organizations innovate, transform, and shift from where they were to where they want to be. But a lot of those change management methods are also outdated. You know, they tended to be episodic.

They had a start date and an end date, and changes that were much slower in comparison to what we're experiencing right now.

The reality is today, change is continuous. The speed and scale of it is pretty massive, and that requires a complete shift in how you respond to that change. It requires complete reinvention in what your business is about, whether your competitive moats still hold or they need to be redefined, and how your people work, how they think, and how they decide. Everything requires a different speed and scale of execution, performance, operating rhythms, and systems.

It's not just about throwing technology at the problem. It's fundamentally restating what the problem even is. And that's why reinvention has become a necessity, and is something that companies have to do not just once, but continuously.

Ross Dawson: There's always this thing—you need to recognize that need. Now, you know, I always say my clients are self-selecting and that they only come to me if they're wanting to think future-wise. And I guess, you know, I presume you get leaders who will come and say, "Yes, I recognize we need to reinvent." But how do you get to that point of recognizing that need? Or, you know, be able to say, "This is the journey we're on"? I mean, what are you seeing?

Nikki Barua: Well, what we're seeing more of is not necessarily awareness that they need to reinvent. What we're seeing a lot of is a lot of pressure to do something. So it's the common theme—the pressure from boards asking the C-suite executives to figure out what their game plan is, how they plan to leverage AI or respond to adapting to AI.

There is a lot of competitive pressure of seeing your peers in the industry leapfrog ahead, so the fear that we're going to get left behind. And then, of course, some level of shiny object syndrome—seeing a lot of exciting new tools and technologies and not wanting to get left behind in investing in that.

So somehow, from a variety of sources, there's a lot of pressure—pressure to do something. What is happening as a result is there's a little bit of executive inertia. There's a lot of pressure, but if I'm unclear about exactly what I'm supposed to do, exactly where to focus and what to invest in, I'm not sure how to navigate through that kind of uncertainty and fast pace.

So a lot of the initial conversations actually start from there—where do I even begin? What should I focus on?

Ross Dawson: That's the state of the world today?

Nikki Barua: Exactly. I mean, well, welcome to era of leadership, right? I mean, there's no business school or textbook that prepares you for it. You have to lead through uncertainty and the unknown and be more of an explorer than an expert who knows it all.

Ross Dawson: So, I mean, you're, of course, very human-focused, and we'll get back to that. But you mentioned AI. And of course, one of the key factors in all of this—what do I do—is AI. So how does this come in when you have leaders who say, "All right, I need to work out what to do, or I need to reinvent myself"? How do you think they should be framing the role of AI in their organization?

Nikki Barua: Well, I'll tell you two things that they often come stuck with. One is, "Well, we know we need to do something about AI, and we've got an IT team." And to me, that's mistake number one. If you think this is an IT problem, you've already failed. So let's start with that. That's the wrong framing of the problem and the wrong responsibility.

This is fundamentally about reinvention of the business and a leadership challenge, because it impacts people and culture and how you work. So don't delegate it to a department and think you've got it taken care of.

The second thing is waiting for the perfect moment where you have total clarity and certainty to take even one step forward. And that's another huge mistake, because by the time you are ready to act, so much more will have changed.

The only way to think about it is like building muscle—you need the reps. You need to dive in. Don't be a bystander while the greatest disruption in modern history is happening. Step into the arena, start experimenting, build a culture of exploration, and admit your vulnerabilities.

To go in during this time as any leader at any level and say, "I know it all, I have the perfect game plan," is like saying you can predict the future. You can't. The only thing you can do is build a culture where you can experiment together, iterate in short sprints with clear business purpose, and start to figure out what's working and what's not.

How can we really unlock grassroots innovation across the board? And when you do that with psychological safety for your teams, and the agility and adaptability with which you respond to this, you're still going to come out far ahead, even if you don't have the perfect answer at the goal line.

Ross Dawson: Well, there's plenty of talk of culture of experimentation and psychological safety and stuff, but it's a lot easier to say than do.

Nikki Barua: Often they end up being lip service—things that are talked about. But the reality is, there's no endless budgets and endless appetite for failure, which is why I think one way to do this is to experiment at smaller scale and shorter sprints. You're putting guardrails around that experimentation.

One example I came across was a very large company, a global brand that invested millions of dollars and over a 100-person team dedicated to AI-led innovation with no real clear purpose. It was sort of like, "Here's a whole bunch of people and a ton of money and budget associated with that." A year later, when they failed to come back with anything concrete that was really valuable, it was written off as "the problem is AI," or "we should not be experimenting." And that's the wrong takeaway, because it's really an ineffective structure for how you might experiment and make it easier for people to build the competency around continuous reinvention and innovation.

Ross Dawson: So are there any examples you've seen of organizations that have made a shift to a bit more culture of experimentation than they had in the past? Can you describe some of the things that happened there?

Nikki Barua: Yeah, one of my favorite instances, especially this year, is a pretty large manufacturing company that started from a place of org design, which is really interesting, because they didn't start with "what's the technology application," or "let's provide AI training and certification to all our people." They started looking at, "How might we gain speed and empower teams to embody the entrepreneurial spirit?" How do we start looking at org design differently?

One of the things that they did was, instead of the traditional departmental structure with hierarchy and the pyramid model, they created what I would call agile, Navy SEAL-like teams—smaller teams with a very clear purpose, with cross-functional skills, all with a specific problem to solve. With that objective, they gave them the autonomy to experiment.

What came out of that was almost a hackathon-like energy and the ability for these teams to figure out how to solve concrete business problems they were facing across different parts of the business, whether it was marketing, sales, operations, product development, and so forth. Each one was able to innovate that way and really find practical usage of AI within their workflows, but also optimize for efficiency, speed, decision-making, and collaboration in a whole different way.

All of that happened because they operated as these independent units. It's the difference between the Titanic and 100 speedboats—if they're all going the same direction, the speed and agility you get is fundamentally different.

But what was interesting to me in that example was that the starting point was actually org design. The starting point was not training or technology.

Ross Dawson: Yeah, well, the org design has to be a piece of it, an important piece of it. But I think what I take away largely from that is you gave them a sample of it, a taster—as in, saying, "All right, well, we can experience what it's like to try stuff, and to work together, and to come up with new ideas and to put some of those in practice." And actually, this is quite fun, and I can see that it's useful. So that's where you've got to have some positive experience in order to shift the way you go about things.

Nikki Barua: Yeah, I think the positive experience piece plays such a key role in building confidence and belief in taking risk, right? So once you have the evidence that this worked, this formula, this approach worked, you're more likely to do it.

And that's what goes back to the human side of any of this disruption—we still have to address the things that often hold humans back: the fears, the insecurities, the need for certainty and security and comfort. Unless you address those needs, you cannot shift teams into a different paradigm where the expectations are fundamentally different.

Some of this that we've come across is even the identity shift that is necessary, because old identities served a pre-AI work environment, and you cannot go into a post-AI era with the old identities, mindsets, and behaviors. It requires a shift of that kind to really bring out the value and impact.

Ross Dawson: When you were chatting before, you talked about the example of the instance of identity around hard work.

Nikki Barua: Yeah, and that's one of the examples that really stood out for me in some of the work that we do. It's a company that had deployed significant investments in technology and a wide variety of tools with the expectation that that would have a dramatic increase in performance and output and throughput and so forth, and yet they were struggling to see the adoption. They could not figure out why.

And by the way, this was a tech company, so it's not like they're in a legacy industry. This is a large tech company that was not seeing the ROI from the investments they had made.

In our work with them, one of the things that we start with is the people side. We don't start with the tech adoption. We start with, "What will it take to help people reinvent how they think and work and approach their responsibilities?" Then we work with teams on the process reinvention and finding the tools.

So in the first part of working with people, some of the things that surfaced in our work was how core values and your conditioning and the beliefs you develop from that actually become an impediment to AI adoption. In this case, this individual said, "When I use AI, I feel like I'm cheating, because my identity is built around hard work and long hours. I've spent my entire career being first in, last out. I put in a lot of hours. I hustle and grind really hard, and I put in all this effort, and today, so much of that work is done in minutes because of AI, and I don't like that because it doesn't make me feel good at the end of the day, so I'm going to still put in the long hours and do the hard work."

So this is someone who did not fully adopt the tools available because it made her feel like she was cheating. And that is the kind of thing that, unless the company is aware of those invisible barriers that get in the way, they're not going to be able to solve it.

By helping that individual and people like them shift their identity to, "How might you define your value and worth with AI, with humans collaborating with machines that actually make you exponentially more capable, as opposed to less valuable?"—that allows for a whole different way of approaching work and collaborating with machines.

Ross Dawson: Yeah, the identity shift is real, and I think, you know, when we're working with ourselves, all right, let's say, "All right, I recognize that I need to shift, and I'm fine. Let me think through and work out who I am versus who I was." But if you are a leader of an organization or an external consulting organization coming in to help, I mean, basically what you're saying is the job is to come in and you're going to change their core values, you're going to change their beliefs, you're going to change their identity as a person. That is a fairly big challenge.

And I guess, you know, framed in that way, it's necessary, but it's almost impossible. But any incremental ways in which you can help people help themselves on that journey is going to be positive. So how is it that you can, from the outside, help someone recognize that there's value to them in shifting their beliefs and values and identity?

Nikki Barua: Yeah, and that's why the approach we've taken is not someone telling them that they need to do it, but giving them the tools, the frameworks, and the strategies that help them figure it out for themselves. That empowerment is so necessary for them to not feel like they're being replaced or being told that they're irrelevant to this new environment, but discovering their true inner zone of genius.

What is that that actually is relevant in this future context, in this new context? What are the parts of yourself that you want to amplify that actually create massive value, versus the parts of how you applied yourself, your energy or time on a daily basis, that you need to let go of? That allows you to shift from lower value tasks to higher value tasks.

When you're able to shift not only who you are and the identity that actually creates more value in the future, but also what you hold on to, that then allows you to create real leverage in your own personal workflows as well.

You start to rethink, "Okay, every day, how did I do my job? Maybe it was a six-step process that I followed every day—what parts of this can I create unique value versus the parts that machines can do for me now?" Now, it releases more capacity, more mind space, for me to continuously do more.

What we're finding is that once that capacity gets released, what's interesting is they might find that they can shed like 40% of the work that they used to do, and machines can do it now. There's another leap that they have to make that is often invisible to their own supervisors, and that is a question of reallocation. Forty percent capacity got released. How are you reallocating that?

If you don't do that, even all of the optimization or the efficiencies gained, or the speed or scale you achieved, does not actually convert into actual enterprise-wide results. The only way it does that is if that individual is driving that reallocation.

There was an interesting study done by a large consulting firm, and what they found was all of the efficiencies gained by individual employees of a company because of AI only led to more personal time, not necessarily more productivity and higher performance.

Ross Dawson: So two things I want to dig into there. One is you mentioned frameworks and tools and so on for individuals for their journey. So what do those look like? What are examples of frameworks or tools or processes that you can give to people to help them work this through?

Nikki Barua: Yeah, so the starting point—our methodology is built on a combination of change management methods as well as neuroscience and innovation techniques and all of that. But it's really more about the delivery mechanism. It's a persistent tool, similar to Grammarly, that is persistent in your workflow and your browser.

So our agentic system actually is persistent in each individual employee's workflow. It's guiding them as they're doing their work to discover new ways of doing things, or new ways of making decisions and giving recommendations, but also engaging with them as their coworker of sorts. It's there to guide them into a different way of going through this process.

In addition to that, we take them through a 90-day reinvention lab, where every week they are given specific strategies, not only to learn, but to actually apply in real life that very same week, and start to see the results of that compound.

The reason we do that 90-day reinvention lab is it starts to build evidence—success. It's not passive learning, it's active application. When they start to see, "Okay, I can make this change in something that I have an appetite for—it's not so much change that scares me, but it's enough change that I can take on this change every week," and they start to see the results in their productivity, in how they're valued at work, in shedding the old behavior, adopting the new behavior, and it's still okay. It actually makes them more relevant.

As they start to see that week after week, and they have an agentic system embedded in their workflow, and they see the results compound, what we have found in our diagnostic measures is we start to see an 80% shift in behavior in just 90 days. So even being able to measure their baseline and to see the shift week after week, and to see that in 90 days, it leads to significant shift in identity, behaviors, habits, and even their workflow—personal workflow redesign that guides them into not only being more efficient, moving to higher value tasks, but also reallocating what that freed capacity goes into. That's what's creating results, not just at the individual employee level, but then aggregated starts to end create enterprise impact.

Ross Dawson: That's very interesting. So, amongst other things, in addition to the AI agent tracking, each week they're tasked with a "do something, try something" ask?

Nikki Barua: And it starts with—the starting point is always figuring out what's the business priority. So we don't just create this open-ended innovation thing of, "Let's go experiment with this in week one or week two." It's always tied to what is that particular group's objective, what's the most important business impact they can create.

Think of it almost like a business school case challenge. You have a specific challenge to solve, and now you're going into it in a cohort, and you are using a series of frameworks to solve that particular challenge in bite-size increments, with AI as your partner, as your co-evolution partner, and you're applying those tools and those frameworks to solve that challenge, and you start to see the results of that in very concrete terms.

So the end result is you end up with redesigned workflows, adoption of new tools, freed up capacity, and greater capacity to take on more work, and clarity around the value of reinventing yourself instead of the fear and the confusion and the chaos around it.

Ross Dawson: So you mentioned as a cohort. So this is run as a compact cohort, of course, as work so people go on and, okay, that's great.

Nikki Barua: And what that also does is, because the cohorts are functional teams, it also gives them new ways of establishing team norms, new KPIs, new outcomes, because what they're doing is essentially reinventing as a team. "How might we do this function differently? If this is our objective, and this is how we've historically collaborated, how might we reinvent that from a people, process, and tool standpoint?"

It gives them a new kind of language, a new vocabulary, new team norms that make them more agile and more confident that no matter how much uncertainty there is in the future, they'll be able to figure out a way.

Ross Dawson: Great! so I want to look back to the capacity reallocation. So as I understood what you were saying, somebody uses AI to free up time from what they have been doing before, and so they have now capacity. So they, as individuals, come up with the ideas of how it is they reallocate their own capacity. How does that fit into an enterprise context where everyone's coming up with new ideas for other things that you can do.

Nikki Barua: That's why it all goes back to first establishing what the key priority is before the cohort even begins. So when they know that is the ultimate business objective that they have, now that you have freed up capacity, in what way can you align that freed up capacity to the greatest value creation? Being able to identify that—whether it is, "Hey, I can take on more projects," or "I can handle more customer accounts," or "Here's something that I can do in shorter cycles"—being able to correlate new ideas for the freed up capacity directly back to the primary business objective makes it more concrete.

Part of the process is also where it goes back to aligning that to what the teams are agreeing upon, what the leaders approve. Those interventions are part of it. So it's never done in isolation, with just an individual coming up with new ideas to use up their free capacity, or worse still, coming up with their own tech stack—which is one of the dangers. I've seen that with companies where it's sort of a free-for-all of "let's all experiment with AI with no direction," and then everyone ends up with a personal tech stack that is completely violating every sort of security guideline or coming up with ideas that don't correlate to actual business results.

Ross Dawson: Fantastic. So just tell me a story. Just give me an example which illustrates some of the things we've been talking about around this shift in identity and, you know, as part of a journey of organizational reinvention.

Nikki Barua: Yeah, well, one of the companies that we worked with—what was interesting was that it was actually the engineering team. My initial hypothesis was that it might be a lot of non-technical folks that are uncomfortable with this new way and are perhaps resisting the change or slower to adopt. In this case, it was a large tech company and its engineering division, the core engineering team that went through this entire experience.

So much of what was uncovered, of the fears that they had, was that they now would be completely replaced, because so much of development can be done by AI, and as a result, the unwillingness to adopt components in their engineering and development process that would give them the efficiencies as well as what they valued themselves for.

I remember a few of these individuals in particular that were actually the engineering team leaders. They themselves, and middle management—it's a really interesting situation, because they are not the makers themselves anymore, but so much of what they're having to manage is there's a resistance to, "Now, am I really going to manage a team of humans plus agents? What does that look like for me as a leader? How do I lead differently?" Even though these are advanced techies, there was underlying fear around their own ability to adapt, their relevancy and value, and being replaceable.

They knew that at some point, if we don't have more need, the capacity is going to shrink. So in these cohort conversations, so much of what came about was deeply human needs and fears. It had nothing to do with the technical proficiencies or their efficiencies or productivity gains. It all came down to what connected the sense of worth and identity to this new environment.

Being able to unpack that, not just at the individual contributor level, but understanding how it's impacting team leaders—from worrying about not knowing how to lead, "What does this mean for me as a manager or leader, and how am I supposed to lead when I myself am terrified and I'm not sure I'm going to have a job, because you're not going to need that many team managers and leaders?"—and being able to help them identify new ways of creating value that they discovered for themselves and started to see that they could actually create a whole different way of working.

Within 90 days, to see that transformation—to see them from going, when we did the diagnostic at the baseline level, this was a group that scored something like 30% on the scale, and within 90 days to see them at like 85%—to get there in terms of their confidence around adoption, their confidence about value creation, their own shift in identity and discovering that, yes, there's a lot of new things that we have to learn, and there's a lot of old things that we have to shed, but we now see that we can get there.

To see that engineering team—ultimately, the objective that they had was to increase throughput. The goal for the enterprise was, really, "How can we increase our engineering throughput so that we can ship product faster?" But we're not going to be able to do that if they're resisting reimagining how they do their work. And interestingly, more than the engineers, it was the team leaders that was the bottleneck in this case.

Ross Dawson: Yeah, I think that's not an uncommon story. So just before we wrap up, just to go big picture—next few years, what do you see in how organizations shift? Are they going to do it? Are they going to reinvent? What's the path? How's humans plus AI going to play out in the enterprise?

Nikki Barua: I think the ones that truly embrace reinvention will win disproportionately compared to the ones that are slower to step in or adopt very superficial ways of adopting AI. When it's just about, "Oh, we've got an enterprise ChatGPT license," well, that's not going to change your business. Blockbuster would have never become Netflix just by throwing more tech licenses at it. Netflix emerged by complete reinvention of the business that they were in, and that's what it's going to take.

We're certainly seeing examples of companies that are truly at the leading edge in terms of how they're thinking about the future and what possibilities they see. We are going to see more monopolistic businesses emerge that will grow bigger and bigger exponentially, and others that will start to diminish in size, and many that will perish as well.

I see a rise of entrepreneurship, partly by choice, partly forced into it because of shrinking workforces and potentially an evolution of the org design from pyramid models to diamond models, because a lot of the entry-level work historically has been a lot of grunt work that machines can do better, faster, and cheaper than entry-level workers ever can.

That, to me, is a scary future, because I don't know what that means in terms of college students stepping into their first job and not having as many jobs or opportunities, and more importantly, the loss of apprenticeship and skill building that helps them become the workforce of the future.

So those are some of the macro-level things that I think we'll see—changes at all levels, from what leadership looks like, what org design needs to be, how incentives change, how talent pipelines are built, which will require policy change as well. I think governments around the world are going to have to think about what does that mean in terms of how policy shifts to support this new reality. And then academic institutions—my gosh, they're in for a world of reinvention if they have to stay relevant and actually still contribute value in society.

Ross Dawson: Absolutely. So, Nikki, where can people go to find out more about your work?

Nikki Barua: I would love to connect with folks on LinkedIn or through my website at nikkibarua.com and through my company website at flipwork.ai.

Ross Dawson: Fantastic. Thanks so much for sharing your insights today. It's been a wonderful conversation.

Nikki Barua: Thanks for having me, Ross.

The post Nikki Barua on reinvention, reframing problems, identity shifts for AI adoption, and the future workforce (HAI Ep29) appeared first on Humans + AI.