Deloitte debate: AI and the future of work in your organization

In this UNLEASH webinar watch Trish Steed, CEO and Principal Analyst at H3 HR Advisors, Lily Milash, Senior Manager Consulting at Deloitte ServiceNow, Josh Tyson, Director of Creative Content at OneReach.ai, and Steve Hatfield, Global Future of Work Leader at Deloitte take you through how to change your organization to be ready for AI and how to make the arguments to get business leader buy-in, too!

Webinar Highlights:

AI will augment workers not replace: Robotics, automation, AI. These technologies won’t replace workers but replace a certain percentage of what workers do: the more dangerous, the more dull, the more administrative. And AI will let individuals use this extra capacity to do more exciting, more profitable, more creative work. It’s up to business and HR leaders to decide how to use this extra time.

AI will ‘allow human workers to be more uniquely human’: With AI taking more of the process and administrative work away from humans, it should unleash employees to be more human. This should mean more complex systems thinking, more creativity, more strategizing, and more problem-solving.

Workers are driving workplace uptake of AI: The use of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT spread fast, with 100 million users accessing the tool within the first few months. And this has been driven by individuals taking the initiative and interpolating the use of these tools in their day jobs. It means HR has to think more deeply about how to use these tools for strategic business use but also how to ensure workers still have autonomy over using these tools. A collaborative approach will be key.

Leaders should lead the way: Currently lots of use of AI is being driven by individuals taking it on themselves to implement it into their day jobs. This can lead to a haphazard approach that involves some risk to a business’ brand. However, with co-creation, workers and organizations together can drive useful automation that benefits businesses and individuals.

Now we’ve landed in this post-pandemic era, the era of more modern work, the zeitgeist around AI has increased exponentially….so the things to watch are six shifts: how AI moves us from automation to augmentation…from flex work to flexing everything…from jobs to skills…how it moves the conversation to productivity to human performance…from employees to workforce eco-systems and from employer-led to employee-led.

Steve Hatfield, Global Future of Work Leader at Deloitte speaks to the biggest trends and opportunities that will shape the data-driven AI revolution in change-welcoming businesses in the next few years.

To find out more about what these trends mean and how they can be harnessed for good — in essence asking how AI can be a workplace panacea — our experts lead conversations on implementing AI effectively.

The secret to effective AI implementation: trust and leadership

As laid out at the start of the webinar, the key to utilizing AI effectively, to elevate human performance at work, will be trust (with employers engaging workers more directly in change) and an improved leadership mindset.

“The thing is, leaders, don’t know where to start. There is so much change and disruption they don’t know which way to pull first,” says Steve Hatfield, when speaking on using AI and getting comfortable with disrupting the usual paradigm of work, productivity, output, and managing.

The solution: get past legacy mindsets of how input and output and old top-down managerial approaches used to work; get used to working in a boundaryless organization; think like a researcher, and get more comfortable with experimentation; get better at co-creation, with employees and employers working better in tandem; and, finally, prioritize human outcomes, with business results held alongside societal and human results, too.

“We have to ask how do we unlock worker potential and a greater level of organizational performance?” he says.

AI and productivity

With work models shifting and employers searching desperately for the skills they need, many are struggling to keep up the right levels of productivity. “What is key is solving this productivity and human performance challenge… by orchestrating a human-machine collaboration [via AI] and augmentation of work strategically to free up employee time,” says Lily Milash, Senior Manager Consulting at Deloitte ServiceNow.

She adds that this will involve looking at where AI can help provide insights through many functions, by automating requests and workflows and reducing the number of tasks.