Author Ethan Mollick on ‘Co-Intelligence,’ a new stealth AI ‘agent’ for Human Resources and more in the latest Future of Work newsletter from Forbes. Sign up to get it delivered to your inbox Mondays.This is the published version of Forbes' Future of Work newsletter, which offers the latest news for chief human resources officers and other talent managers on disruptive technologies, managing the workforce and trends in the remote work debate.
It comes down in large part to what those CEOs are saying—is their money where their mouth is? You can view this as incredibly freeing technology. When we survey people about AI use, they inevitably say they like it because it frees them from drudgery, even though they're worried.
I ask four questions of organizations . What did you do that was valuable that's no longer valuable? What impossible things can you now do that you could not before? What can you democratize and bring down market? What can you do upmarket so you have new ways of competing? There’s new angles to follow. Your job is to figure that out. If you keep your productivity the exact same with less people, you're not going to win in a world where other people are getting productivity gains.
Innovation is not your IT people anymore. AI doesn’t work like IT, it works like a person. HR is your center of development right now. Learning and development is your only bulwark against what’s about to happen to apprenticeship and learning. These parts of your organization that you didn't care about as much are now a really big deal. Your innovations are not going to come from your IT department. They're going to come from employees using AI.
How do you get to be a good banker? You do models over and over again while someone yells at you. AI is going to require us to rethink what we want people to do and how we want to train them. The overall theme that comes out of this conversation is that organizations have agency, but they also have to realize they have to change how they operate. They can’t operate the way they did before. And structural change is hard.