AI may be good at getting rid of tedious manual tasks and getting insights which may have been hidden from us, but its outputs still require human oversight at the process level which these automated tasks are a part of.
Farsighted businesses to rely on human-tool teamwork
Seen in this light, the true power of AI probably lies in its ability to augment human effort and brainpower rather than attempting to replace it through automation.
In this respect, it’s important to distinguish between automation and augmentation. While automation focuses on removing the job from human hands, augmentation focuses on enhancing human ability by utilising technologies to create tools that either enable us to do things better or provide us with the ability to do things which we were never able to do before.
Automation has traditionally been employed as a cost cutting measure, but organisations are now focusing much more on business growth and customer experience. Augmentation speaks to that agenda.
Many organisations will, therefore, not seek to automate jobs because they don’t see the value in doing it. The loss of the human touch will simply be too great a price to pay whereas the value of the human involvement can be enhanced by AI if used properly.
Farsighted businesses are focusing on that added value.
A furniture manufacturer has invested heavily in AI for their call centres. The traditional approach would have been to automate the calls with customers to reduce costs of operations. But through the realisation that the value provided by the call centre lies in the experience which customers get, they used AI as an augmentation tool instead. And this, instead of focusing on cost reductions, which may have detrimental impact on customer experiences, focused on creating additional value to those customers and thereby increased brand and business impact in the market.
At the other end of the spectrum are those roles that have been described as “warm hands” – nurses, doctors, and other medical professionals. Role of nurses are not going to be automated – not only because it is a job which is difficult to automate, but also because the value of the job is in the nature of it being human care.
The same applies to a GP. However, there are ways for AI to augment their work. For example, having AI record conversations during consultations and populating the patients’ health records would speed up the doctor’s work quite significantly. All the GP will need to do is check the form at the end of the consultation to complete any missing fields.
There are few roles left in modern businesses that lend themselves to full automation after more than two centuries of technological innovation. Augmentation will offer a far clearer and better pathway to value generation.
Summary
AI has the potential to automate many workplace tasks, but this is probably not the best use case for the technology. Utilising it for those activities that it can perform better than humans and allowing the humans to focus on those areas where they are superior has the potential to deliver real competitive advantage. Augmentation will deliver superior results to automation in almost every case.
