Tom Goodwin on what AI really means for client work

Transcript for the video 'Tom Godwin - The Sprint To AI':

Hi, I'm Tom Goodwin. I'm here with teamwork dot com discussing their new report about AI in the workplace. My job is to understand how technology is and isn't changing the world. How is it changing consumer expectations? How is it changing consumer behaviors? How is it changing company cultures? What can we do to make the most of technology to do our jobs better and to bring about more profound and exciting solutions? I work a lot with companies who are interfacing with a whole variety of stakeholders. The main goal really is that people are trying to create products or platforms that help people work in more efficient and effective ways. So I work with a lot of different types of professional services organizations, everything from agencies to designers, architects, construction firms, very different people with very different needs, but many of them will have a client type structure that they need to support. Many of them will need to bring together large groups of people to work on quite complex projects. My general take on AI is it is an amazing canvas of technologies. There's no such thing as AI. It's a kind of broad tapestry of opportunity that comes about by very advanced technologies, some of which we would call AI and some of which are other things. But what happens is together, all of these technologies combine to create this amazing new canvas of opportunities. Now, some of those things might be linked to sort of vision. Some of those things might be linked to sort of algorithmic decisioning. Some of those elements are down to automation. Every time a new technology arrives, there's always a degree of hype. There is this huge sense of optimism. There's this huge sense of naivety. And there's this huge sense of wonder about what might be possible. But it is removed from the day to day realities of most people's jobs. So I think there's a lot of envy. There's a lot of confusion. There's lot of chaos out there where most clients are dabbling with AI. They're sort of using AI in quite a superficial way, driven by this real sense of fear that somehow they're not getting it right. There's this huge sense that people are not doing enough, there's this huge sense that people need to try it faster, There's this huge sense that people need to say yes to everything. Using this sort of impatient approach, we're actually seeing really ineffective uses of AI. And we're starting to lose a focus on what really matters, which is creating solutions that really help our clients. I tend to think the broad canvas of opportunity that comes from AI is extraordinarily exciting and profound. We are on the edge of a sort of paradigm shift in how people work, that we need to be much more ambitious and empathetic and imaginative about how we use this technology. I am just aware that it may take some time and it may find its way in more complicated ways than we think. And there may be many missteps and there may be a degree of disappointment. The curve will last a long time and I think we'll probably see this sort of trough of disillusionment happen quite soon when it becomes apparent that AI is not just a sort of magic wand that you can wave over things and you need to think about the right place to apply it. We'll go beyond the hype into a more sort of considered and sophisticated application of AI in the right places. And as part of that, we'll also start to sort of restructure companies a little, you know, rather than the application of AI to the way that we've done things before, we'll start to think about different ways to do things, to different tools, different processes, different workflows, different structures, and we rethink companies around that. That's probably where we'll see this huge surge of productivity. This idea that the early bird catches the worm, I don't think that's necessarily true. Is this. There's always this sort of very exciting idea in technology that the first companies to use technologies, see enormous leapfrogs in performance. There's almost no evidence to suggest that's true at all. If you look at the largest and most successful companies today in technology, they haven't been first. And there are always companies that have applied the technology at the right time. They've always used it when the technology is good enough. They've used it when it's fast enough, when it's cheap enough. So this idea that you have to be really, really fast in order to win just just simply isn't true. You need to operate at the right time. It takes a long time for technology to really be digested, and we can find the sort of little parts of the process that can be improved with technology. That's actually a very, very bad way to improve a product. Know, rather than to apply it where it's easiest to apply or it's quickest to apply or where it's politically more easy to apply, we need to take a bit of a step back and apply it in a much more profound and central and core way. The world won't be changed by automatically writing emails or automatically writing pictures. The world will be changed by entire new workflows and entire new ways of doing things and entire new incentive structures, new business models. That's where we'll see the companies really leapfrog in how they perform. We need to be really, really careful at the moment. I've never seen people more fearful about a new technology. There is this huge sense of anxiety that a computer will do their job. Companies need to go through a process where they're bringing their staff with them. And there's an element of reassurance, and there's an element of clarity around vision. The very easiest way to apply a technology is to look at the things you've done before and to do them easier or faster. And therefore, lot of leaders, I think, are looking at this technology as a way to do things more cheaply and essentially to get rid of people. I think we need to go through a process where we're much more ambitious. And rather than thinking about faster or easier or cheaper, we're thinking about better. So how can this technology or this group of technologies enable us all to do our jobs in a much better way? How can we add more value? How can we be more thoughtful? How can we use our instinct? How can we drive our imagination? We need to create a construct where we're automating what is quite mundane and boring, and we're freeing up people to be the best human they can be. And that involves unleashing their imagination, leveraging the wonder that is being a human being today. I think the biggest mind shift that is happening in companies is actually to be a little bit more relaxed about this. I think there's this unbelievable sense that companies need to show to each other that they're on top of this. So what we're seeing is unbelievably rapid, unbelievably superficial, and often quite stupid innovation around AI in a really ineffective way. So I think there needs to be the confidence to say to the world, we get this. We know it's going to be extremely profound, but let's do this properly. I mean, everything I see done with AI today in terms of numbers is quite stupid. I mean, it's as if we've taken every single text entry box and we put a little magic one there. We've used the icon, the kind of sparkle logo, as a way to sort of like add magic to every part of the process. It's actually quite sort of laughable when you look at quite how superficial and thin these applications are. You know, it's almost like every sort of product manager has been tasked with finding a way to put AI in as many places as possible that doesn't actually involve any core writing of code or it doesn't actually involve any integration with other systems. So what we see are these really sort of facile and really unhelpful and really clumsy adoption of AI into parts of a process that as a consumer mean nothing. One is we need the calmness. Two is we need more ambition. And three, and this is the most important thing, is we need to work around the wishes of our customers. Not that many people want to render out a movie. A lot of people want to render out an invoice. Not a lot of people want to automate the production of music, but a lot of people want their expenses to be done more quickly. Ultimately, it means doing the things that people really want to have done rather than the stuff that's easiest to code. For a long time in my work, I've been focusing on the degree to which companies are made up of well intentioned decisions that over time become more complicated and processes that become calcified. I've always used kind of architecture almost as the example where it's as if a kind of building with an old foundation is slowly added to and you get clutches and workarounds and tarpaulin and duct tape. Over time processes get more complicated, people find workarounds, people don't really understand how systems work and we have these kind of Frankenstein solutions where people know that they work and they don't know how. For me, this is a really clear opportunity in the world right now is to use AI as the excuse to look at this technical debt and to look at this level of duplication and to look at these really old processes and incredibly old software. And rather than to continually maintain those problems, you get the business case to build something new that's best in class, that's so exciting and powerful that you actually change the way that your company works around it. I think a lot of people think that really advanced forms of technology can kind of make amends for their structure. I think it acts the opposite way, actually. I think technology is a lever. Like it tends to sort of exaggerate what we already have. So if you have an unbelievably well formed company, technology will amplify that to make it extraordinarily brilliant. If you have a company with the wrong tools, with the wrong structure, with the wrong foundations in place, all that will happen is we'll simply get to a worse place faster. It will exaggerate and it will amplify all of the faults within that current entity. The solution to this really is to go through a process where you take a few steps back. You know, you figure out what foundations you need, you figure out what vision you need, you figure out why your company exists, and then you proactively create a company around best in class software to deliver against that vision.