A People-first Culture: Role Of Humans In Preserving Trust, Brand Repute, Customer Comfort In Age Of Generative AI
Buckle up because generative AI is in a hurry to change the game! Imagine the internet taking over the world in five years instead of twenty. That's kind of the hurry generative AI is in. While it is difficult to predict exactly where generative AI will go—or take us—we know one thing for sure: It is changing things at a blistering pace. Besides, it’s cool, it is simple to use, and it is moving fast. Comparing the pace of change that generative AI has kicked off with previous revolutionary technologies and innovations can be fun and instructive.
In 2005, the Internet, after being around for 36 years, got its one billionth user. It took 25.8 years to get 1 billion users for Windows. Although forecasts are not available, Generative AI will, most likely, have 1 billion registered users (across various applications) much before the next quarter century. Reason: The growth in data availability, computational power, and open-source collaboration will make generative AI super attractive.
Perhaps it will take a little more than two or three years for the one billionth user of generative AI. The real pace of adoption depends on factors such as ethical considerations, responsible development, and the effectiveness of regulatory guardrails—which are even more unpredictable than technological evolution. But the pace of change is already mesmerizing. We are now also discovering how strange change can be. While we crave change, we are not ready for the scorching acceleration of change coming with generative AI.
As intelligent humans, we want to see change. In meeting after meeting, conference after conference, and casual conversations in my office corridor, I hear people say we must embrace change. This is because we have always found it difficult to ignore the desire to replace old assets, ideas, processes, and relationships with refreshingly new ones.
Change breaks the monotony and tedium of life; it could be a faster path to an exciting future; sometimes, change brings a reassuring sense of security.
So why is the pace of change unleashed by generative AI uncomfortable? Psychologists will tell us that change, at the pace we are now seeing, is challenging to manage because it throws too many variables at us. We cannot focus on our actions today because we know the goalpost may move tomorrow. We get confused, disoriented, and finally overwhelmed as the anchor of well-established behavior patterns becomes unreliable.
What this indicates is obvious: We have to abandon the reliance on known behavior patterns and instead be prompted by instinct. As a society, we have done this before. It hasn’t been at the blistering pace now upon us, but it is not a new phenomenon to us.
Starting around 1760, the Industrial Revolution brought a steady drip of change. By the early 1800s, steam had changed the manufacturing, transport, and communication industries. We had electric generators and motors, the telegraph and telephone, the light bulb, and the steamship.
People moved from their villages to cities because work was available in the factories of mass production. These factories were nothing like what people had seen before. But they had time—over half a century—to adjust to the new ways of working. Mechanization, machine tools, shift systems, assembly lines, and workplace rules evolved steadily but slowly. Over the space of approximately 70 years, the revolution increased the wealth of nations, distributing it more widely. It was a welcome change.
With the Industrial Revolution came challenges. Cities became crowded, pollution began to affect health, and crime rates rocketed. The Industrial Revolution affected life dramatically, but the change was slow and easy to understand. The change that generative AI has triggered is at warp speed and is, therefore, making it difficult to wrap our heads around.
But like the Industrial Revolution, generative AI will also bring fresh challenges. Will the change be destabilising? Today, there is no way to answer that question with reasonable confidence.
The biggest fear regarding the change is that the skills many of us have will be rendered meaningless. It will force us to rearrange how we view business, society, and life itself. But the comforting truth is that there is no substitute for human experience, intuition, and the warm touch of a human. We only realise this when the human in the system goes missing.
Think about it. When there is a glitch in your travel bookings or a mess up with an online transaction, automated systems that attempt a fix or a resolution can prove to be frustrating. We immediately want an empathetic human being to talk to. We want to speak to a person who will understand the problem and fix it. We want to talk to humans who sympathize with our quirks and flaws.
The human connection matters more than efficiency. Wise organizations already know that their people are, and will continue to be, the key differentiators of their products, services, and culture. They are obsessive about their people-first culture. They know that if they replace every human with an intelligent bot, they will lose their differentiator. If they make humans and AI work together, they will improve outcomes by several magnitudes.
Zappos is my favorite example of keeping that human connection secure by providing “knowledge, empathy, and comfort.” It has a 24/7 customer service hotline that answers questions on anything—literally anything, from the weather to planning a vacation. No purchase is required.
Yes, jobs are under the pump with technology. Open AI’s Sora, which creates video from text, drew a mix of amazement, fear, and excitement with its refined capabilities when it was launched in the second week of February. Sora is going to make several jobs in the television and movie industry redundant. But even Sora needs prompts crafted by humans. That’s an evolutionary step in the creative process—grunt work is history if you can do the hard part, which is imagination.
The strongest adversary of generative AI will also agree that evolution is good. It is an inevitability we have lived with for 300,000 years. If there is anything we have learned in these years, it is how to rebalance the human-machine equation quickly. I see the role of humans in preserving trust, brand repute, and customer comfort increasing with every change that generative AI ushers in. How we learn to do this—when the change in roles is happening in months and not decades—is up to each one of us.
