GenAI-Based Digital Employees vs. ’Biological’ Employees

The Digital World and the Real World will continue overlapping, and that will accelerate with GenAI, which will require organizations to define and implement responsible strategies to ensure that the benefits surpass the potential negative effects. (No ChatGPT used in this article!)

In my prior article I talked about how deploying GenAI into an enterprise requires a huge level of change management, to the point that chief human resources officers (CHROs) could end up being more critical for successful GenAI deployments than chief information officers (CIOs)) or chief digital transformation officers (CDTOs). In this article, I double-down on the people-related implications from GenAI deployments. There are serious potential positive and negative implications that are crucial to understand as we all move our organizations into this GenAI journey.

Some organizations are moving at a steady speed while others are at accelerated speed in terms of deploying GenAI. Some are looking for productivity improvements, some are looking for innovation, and others are looking for both. The option to “wait and see” is not an option anymore, as we have seen over the years with other technology trends. This time it is different, and much faster, because GenAI can be used by any employee in the organization without the need of any technical background – so it will eventually happen, whether you plan for it or not.

It is evident that employees can gain productivity with GenAI by increasing their “yield” of valuable work, doing more with less or equal time, such as sending more emails, writing more memos, making more proactive calls (because they need less time to prepare), deliver more designs, produce more products or prototypes, among others. But also, some people would like to get some more free time as a result of the greater productivity – it is estimated that the productivity gains from GenAI have a range of 10-30% leakage, so the business does not have a 100% gain.

It is also evident that employee productivity will vary depending on the specific individual. GenAI will have a different impact on individuals based on their knowledge level, experience, and the actual complexity of the job. A highly skilled employee doing a very complex job might get significant productivity gains (for example, 2X), whereas a medium-skilled employee performing a lot of repetitive tasks might see only nominal improvements.

As you build your implementation plan for GenAI, you need to assume that your employees are already using it, with their own personal approach to it; they are doing BYOAI (Bring-Your-Own AI, similar to BYOD, or Bring-Your-Own-Device, or BYOB for Bring-Your-Own-Bottle in some restaurants) in your organization. At a minimum, you need rules and governance to ensure there are no negative consequences in this regard. GenAI use needs to be secure, fair, reliable and with a well-thought-out plan to manage risk and ensure data privacy.

Beyond the business or technology outcomes, GenAI brings another whole world of people-related behavioral outcomes. This is why it is so critical to have full CIO-CHRO coordination, to ensure that the outcomes are of the positive kind and not the unwanted kind.

What outcomes are we talking about?

Potential positive outcomes:

• Sense of greater accomplishment for increased productivity. 

• Sense of enhanced creativity as a result of getting more new ideas with AI tokens during brainstorming exercises – an AI token is a unit of data that can generate text, images or sounds.

• Hyper-personalized customer experiences.

• Faster, better, and more insights from vast amounts of data.

• Shared experiences and shared purposes strengthen the sense of belonging across communities. 

• Greater individual productivity allows individuals to accomplish more with less time, implement more ideas, and produce more in general.

• Directing some of the productivity gains to more free time to relax or spend time doing non-work-related activities.

• Overall sense of enhanced capabilities – like a “superhuman.”

Potential negative outcomes:

• Sense of loss as AI agents do part of your job – an AI agent is a piece of software that can perform tasks without human intervention.

• Hyper-personalization causing isolation of individuals.

• Greater digital divide given newer technologies only accessible to part of the population.

• Each individual with his/her own unique experiences becoming polarized.

• Less data privacy and continuous surveillance. 

• Individual mood changes due to higher impact data, images, and videos.

• Misinformation spreading faster than ever.

• AI addiction making individuals want to stay in the Digital World and not engage with the real one.

• Unexpected new mental health consequences can range from love (like AI boyfriends/girlfriends), to mood management and others.

Increasing the level of complexity, there is the possibility that in the future you will have “digital employees” in addition to the regular human employees (“biological employees”) that we are used to. I recently attended a keynote by Jensen Huang, NVIDIA’s CEO, at a Gartner Group event. Huang anticipates that very soon we will be recruiting digital employees, and we will need to train them, define job rules specific to them, and teach them to collaborate with biological employees. So eventually you will have working teams comprising both digital and biological employees; therefore, the challenge to have sound human-centered strategies to implement GenAI in organizations will become more crucial than ever. 

These are exciting times, and I am still optimistic. While surely certain jobs will go away, I think that we will need to create more AI jobs to grow your business, and then you will be able to add more biological jobs as well. Today, most organizations have more ideas than those that they can pursue, or even test; so ultimately, we can expect innovation to accelerate in every industry, leveraging new digital employees and humans working together.