WLP213 Artificial Intelligence: Our new team member?
We hope you’re enjoying the present focus on the podcast, where we alternate between inviting guests to explore a topic broadly, and a deep-dive from Maya and Pilar into something specific. Today is one of those, where we unpick the implications of AI and automation in remote work.
But first…
What’s going on?
Zoom is incorporating chat - and reflecting the trend of platform convergence, whereby everything wants to do everything. Do we need this? Or is there room for more differentiation - which has to be good for consumer choice.
You can now email from within Teams client and Teams mobile. Why..? Slack also tells admins they can welcome people by email - but surely the whole point of these platforms is to move us away from email?
IT managers thoughts on workplace messaging - new research indicates Slack is still the most preferred, and most workplaces use more than anyway (no, not just yours). Different functionality, shadow IT, or an experimental mindset… what do you think?
Banning ‘out of hours’ email - surely this is treating the symptom not the cause? Reducing autonomy can surely only increase stress. But it reminds us how important email still is...(Thanks for this link Teresa)
Judy Rees
Judy Rees (episode 60) has curated a great set of articles about online meetings, now published at InfoQ. Bad meetings get in the way of the work being done, but not for the reasons first thought of: ‘technology is no longer the problem, the problem is the people’ InfoQ recognised their own needs in this area and were glad to support this extended publication, to really help teams of any size and composition manage their online meetings better. From the tech to the culture to relationship buildings, this guide covers a great deal, so do check it out, and as well as Pilar, you’ll recognise contributions from many of our podcast guests. Judy has training coming up too which will interest listeners judyrees.co.uk @judyrees
Listener question, from Brigitte: Should she pre-screen job applicants by email, for an online role? If writing email is going to be a key part of their job then you need to know if they can write a good email… Otherwise, or additionally, it makes more sense to use selection tools which will reflect the demands of the job they’re seeking. Please send us your questions!
Maya is multitasking… and listening to more and more audiobooks, as a way to learn and do research while getting away from the screen. You can exercise your body while resting your eyes, and still enjoy books!
Don’t forget to share with us ‘what’s going on’ for you, and there’s more news, of course, in our newsletter.
(This topical segment was recorded 30th October 2019)
Artificial Intelligence in remote work
Pilar found this video post from Satya Nadella at Microsoft, explaining how they’re ‘infusing SI across Microsoft 365’ - interesting that this video was made at all, highlighting the need to call out and reassure/celebrate, the growing role of AI in workplace tools. Smart touches like photographing a handwritten table and converting it into a spreadsheet - as Nadella said, ‘the camera is the new keyboard’. The AI is also a presentation coach and hybrid meeting tool (but as we discussed earlier, can’t we fix the meeting culture and remote-first attitude, instead of focusing on the tech..?).
The use of AI in customer service is growing all the time, and many queries are increasingly resolved entirely by ‘virtual agents’ on a self-service basis - changing the role of the human agent, to focus on the exceptional and more interesting cases (feeding their intrinsic motivation through enhanced competence and providing relevant context and help), while the process automation takes away the boring and repetitive aspects.
And like in the Microsoft video, AI can also provide training and development for the individual, such as the product in this article about sales teams ‘unlocking the secret sauce of the sales rockstar’ that Maya wrote for UC Today recently - which analyses sales calls to provide optimised learning and analysis, into previously invisible conversations.
Automation in collaboration platforms has many benefits, including automating reminders to the team (is it better if a bot does the reminding instead of the manager? Pilar had found it helps to distribute responsibility and self-organisation). In our recent episode (WLP209) about the journey to management, we talked about how bots can even elicit more honest responses than a question from someone in a hierarchical relationship, and Slack can also do a lot of the onboarding of new team members now - but we do need to make sure we don’t lose the human touch.
And we didn’t even manage to talk about job security aspects - though Maya has written about this, and we cannot avoid the fact that this workplace revolution will impact on knowledge workers in revolutionary ways. But every tech revolution has created entire new industries and careers that were never foreseen… so let’s not panic yet.
We’ll still need humans for the time being. If you’re a human, we hope you enjoyed this episode, do let us know your thoughts, via our contact form, or social media.
If you’re an AI, we’d love to hear from you too!
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