Categories
Artificial intelligence

4 Mistakes To Avoid When Working With AI

A lot of social posts focus on grand ways to optimise life and work with AI.

This is not one of those posts.

Knowing what not to do often steers us better than searching for countless ‘best practices’. Let’s discuss the common mistakes you can dodge with AI collaboration.

Unfortunately, too many people want amazing results now without the thought process behind it.

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You try to outsource your thinking to AI

Don’t do this. It won’t end well.

Neither does:

  • Delegating everything to AI
  • Not reviewing and editing AI outputs
  • Forgetting about your human skills

Fret not, friend. All hope is not lost.

You can dodge these mistakes by:

Step 1: Getting clear on AI limitations and opportunities

AI is not a silver bullet that does it all.

It can enhance your work if used intelligently, but it can also lead you astray. Take time to research and experiment with your work. Apply your context for use cases.

Step 2: Thinking independently about tasks

So many people take the wrong turn by outsourcing their thinking to AI.

This happens because we’re looking for shortcuts and ways to optimise without the necessary effort. To avoid this, always spend time to set your intentions with AI.

Think critically about what you want to accomplish with x AI tool.

Step 3: Treating AI outputs as ugly first drafts

Probably the simplest thing you can do to not look like a fool.

Read, review and edit everything AI outputs before you share it with anyone. A smart operator combines AI and human thinking. Don’t de-skill yourself and look like a fool at the same time by relying on AI.

It’s just another tool.

Before you go… 👋

If you like my writing and think “Hey, I’d like to hear more of what this guy has to say” then you’re in luck.

You can join me every Tuesday morning for more tools, templates and insights for the modern L&D pro in my weekly newsletter.

Categories
Skills

How To Unlock Your Connective Skills For A Better Career

Skills are better together.

But, are you connecting the right ones?

As part of my ongoing skills anthology, it makes sense to unpack what is the real value of our skills. I mean, we spend so much time talking, investing and building them, we should get clear on the value they bring, right?

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To help us on this journey, a very tasty and long (they’re always long!) research paper from 2023 called “What is the Price of a Skill? The Value of Complementarity”.

It investigates the economic value of skills in the context of complementarity, which refers to how well a skill can be combined with other skills, ideally of high value to benefit each of us.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to regurgitate everything it says.

Instead, I’ve distilled what I feel are the best insights for you to know, explore and apply in your work.

At a glance, this research tells us

  • The value of a skill is relative and depends on the skill background of the worker

  • An analysis of 962 skills found that most skills have the highest value when used in combination with skills of a different type.

  • The report also examines the value of Artificial Intelligence (AI) skills, which are found to be particularly valuable, increasing worker wages by 21% on average due to their strong complementarities and rising demand in recent years.

How can you calculate the value of a skill?

💵 The million-dollar question.

As always, the answer is incredibly contextual. Let me unpack that with the guidance of the report.

The authors propose a method that attaches a market value to skills based on market demand and supply as well as their complementarity with other skills.

That means straightforward and logical. I like it!

Let’s move beyond the surface and get a bit nerdier with this. The report echoed one word continuously “complimentary”. The authors defined this through 3 aspects:

  1. Number of Complements. The number of adjacent skills should be positively related to a skill’s value.

  2. Diversity of Complements. The diversity of adjacent skills should be positively related to a skill’s value.

  3. Value of Complements. The value of the adjacent skills should be positively related to a skill’s value.

Key Takeaway:

The value of a skill is higher if it can be combined with a diverse set of other skills of high value.

In sum: A network of the right skills is vastly more valuable than one skill alone or a mixture of competing skills.

The one skill to rule them all

lord of the rings GIF

Of course, this skill doesn’t exist.

But, unsurprisingly, AI is making a strong case for the future.

As if the word of the year couldn’t boost its appeal even further, the report authors found:

We show that skills needed to construct and maintain AI, which is widely considered to be a major breakthrough technology, have significantly higher skill values than the other skills in our dataset—With a premium of 21 %, AI skills are far more valuable than the average skill in our sample (4 %). AI skills have an above average number of complements of large diversity, since AI technologies enter more and more domains for knowledge work. Furthermore, we track the development of skill values over time and find that AI skills, such as Deep Learning and Python have been gaining in value significantly in recent years. Our model allows us to ascribe these changes to an increase in demand relative to supply.

AI is here to stay and we can’t (and shouldn’t) ignore it.

How you can use these insights

Firstly, let’s cover what you can take away as an individual investing in their skills for the future.

  1. Identify your complementary skills
  2. Focus on AI Skills (delegation and collaboration)
  3. Understand Skill Value
  4. Utilise skill stacking and develop T-shaped skills (see the section below on ‘tools’)
  5. Always look to reskill and upskill

How to identify your complementary L&D skills

This is something I’ve covered in detail before.

My 2023 article on the 7 skills L&D teams need to succeed will help you explore this in detail.

Yet, everything should be contextual for you. My article explores what I see as the baseline for a modern L&D pro.

Your role will no doubt have nuances that I cannot know or directly account for.

I’d recommend you check out the ‘tools’ section below to explore both the concept of skills stacking and T-shaped skills. These will both help you identify what could be some of the most valuable skills to complement and build a high-value skill network.

How to use these insights to inform your 24/25 L&D strategy

Ok. Let’s turn you into the smartest L&D pro in the room in the coming year’s strategy session.

Here’s 4 actions you can take based on this research:

1/ Develop the concept of a complementary skills network

Your workforce won’t organically think of skill development in this way.

We’ve been taught about skills and hear tons about skills-based organisations. But very little on how to structure our own skills network.

→ This can be a simple educative piece through an article or email series.

Use what we’ve discussed so far to educate people on not only the acquisition of the right skills. Teach them how a network of complementary or connective skills is a worthwhile long-term strategy for future-proofing a career.

2/ Highlight complementarity in L&D programs

It’s no good educating teams on the power of complementary skills and your solutions/resources/programs not aligning with this.

Make it clear how your solutions link to other skills. Showcase which of these works best with other things you’ve built. If you make it so simple to build a complementary skill network, people’s behaviours will change.

3/ Promote AI Skill development

No shock or horror here.

Given the increasing value of AI skills, prioritising the development of AI skills among teams is a no-brainer. Especially given their strong complementarities and rising demand, which the research suggests leads to an average increase in worker wages by 21%.

You can get my step-by-step guide to crafting an AI skill-building strategy for your organisation here and access my zero-cost library of AI for L&D insights on the website.

4/ Communicate the value of skills

Building on the first point.

Your people probably aren’t going to get this concept the first time around. Like any change in patterns of thinking, you have to say the same thing a hundred different ways, a hundred different times.

One way to guarantee this hits home is by leveraging financial outcomes.

The better your skills the more money you can command. Think of skills as the currency we each grow across the career marketplace. Companies pay top dollar for the best on the market.

⚒️ Connective skill-building tools

  1. T-Shaped Skills: An incredibly popular methodology and one I still find much use in sharing. Get full details on what, why and how to apply in your work here.

  2. Skill stacking: A model not too dissimilar to others I’m sharing here but one less formal than what you expect for the corpo world. Learn more.

  3. The power of combining skills: A helpful set of insights to approach the skill algorithm.

  4. A collection of modern skill-building strategies: Everything from Ikigai to the 3 E’s skills framework.

📊 Useful Charts

The value of AI skills

The most profitable skills tend to have a higher exposure to AI.

Combine and grow for value

The main idea is that combining skills from different areas is more beneficial, as illustrated in Figure A. Similarly, Figure B demonstrates that having a range of skills within the same field also adds value.

Final thoughts

  • The value of a skill is strongly determined by its complementarity, meaning how well it can be combined with other skills

  • The value of a skill is relative and depends on an employee’s skill background

  • AI collaboration and delegation skills are the most in demand today

  • Design L&D solutions that enable intelligent connective skill-building

Get more from the skills anthology:

  1. The 5 skills that matter for the future of work and how to build them
  2. How to close the skills gap
  3. A deep dive into workplace skills technology

Before you go… 👋

If you like my writing and think “Hey, I’d like to hear more of what this guy has to say” then you’re in luck.

You can join me every Tuesday morning for more tools, templates and insights for the modern L&D pro in my weekly newsletter.

Categories
Learning Technology Skills

The Best Employee Skills Measurement Technology For Work in 2024

Meme of David and Victoria Beckham talking about workplace skills technology

For many of you in the corporate world, I know you’re dealing with thousands of employees and archaic systems.

So, how can you maximise technology to support your skill-building initiatives?

→ We’ll explore this with best skills technology on the market today.

Whilst I can’t provide the perfect advice for your context completely. I’m going to do my best to cover tools and features which could be worthwhile to investigate.

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The players in skills technology for work

Microsoft has 345 million people currently using MS 365 across 150 countries.

It feels smart to explore what this big tech juggernaut offers as I’m sure many of you are sitting in a Microsoft tech stack. Fret not if you don’t, I’ll be covering other skills tech too (I got you Google Workspace friends).

The annual amount of Microsoft 365 corporate users
Source

Microsoft Viva Skills

Earlier this year, Microsoft introduced a new AI-powered Skills solution in Viva.

Their view is traditional job-based talent models often fail to capture individual and organisational capabilities comprehensively. I’m sure we can attest to that, right?

It seems the big aim of Viva is to push more organisations towards that sexy buzzword of a ‘skills-based organisation’.

Of course, it leverages AI.

I mean we have to say that about everything these days. Even my tea is AI-powered 😉.

If you’re company uses Microsoft services, this tool is attractive for a few reasons:

  1. It’s free if you already have the Microsoft Viva suite, which is their LMS baked into Teams
  2. It analyses data from Microsoft Graph to track, assess and recommend actions on org skills
  3. It connects data from the LinkedIn Skill Graph with the above to its mighty AI reasoning tools to bring you the best skills data

The holy grail here is to align all corners of the organisation under the banner of skills.

From what I’ve discovered in my investigative reporting trip (aka a s**t ton of googling and ChatGPT), MS is positioning this as the bridge to fill the gap between traditional structures and a skills-based future.

The focus is on three core scenarios:

1/ Strategic Workforce Planning

For HR and organisational leaders, it aids in aligning workforce capabilities with business goals. It includes a skills dashboard within Viva Insights to visualise skill strengths and gaps.

You can see an example of this ↓

I think it looks pretty neat.

A demo of microsoft viva skills technology for work

2/ Upskilling and Reskilling

Another holy grail of our industry.

We covered the 101 of this before. This is an example of the type of tech you can use to make this a reality. With both real-time data for leaders and employees to make better performance-based decisions.

One step closer to focusing on the right skills, not more skills. I hope, anyway.

This feature is targeted at HR leaders and employees, enabling proactive workforce development. Employees can select skills to learn, search for courses by skills, and receive AI-based skill recommendations.

How Microsoft creates a formidable skills technology platform for the workplace

3/ Skill Discovery in the Flow of Work

What is it with everything ‘in the flow of work’?

Perhaps in 2024, I will coin tea in the flow of work! Stranger things have happened, friend.

This integrates skill discovery into daily tasks. Skills are suggested based on Microsoft Graph signals, and employees can confirm, add, and manage their skills.

Although not perfect, this type of transparency can motivate and engage people in their skill journey.

How it all works

There’s a slick 2-minute video from Microsoft here.

This is my TL;DW (too long; didn’t watch)

The goal of Microsoft Viva Skills tool is to help you uncover and leverage the expertise across the workforce. Here’s my non-techy explanation of how this works:

→ Viva Skills integrates two major data layers:

  • Microsoft Graph: This provides access to data across Microsoft 365 services, including insights about employee activities.
  • LinkedIn Skills Graph: This leverages real-time signals to map how different skills relate to each other, to jobs, and to learning content.

→ Using the data from these two sources, Viva Skills employs AI reasoning to infer the expertise of employees.

Using this AI reasoning, Viva Skills intelligently crafts individual skill profiles. It provides an updated understanding of current workforce skills and a more nuanced and dynamic understanding of emerging workforce capabilities. That’s a big win.

This information is then integrated into Viva and Microsoft 365 experiences.

Microsoft and LinkedIn Skills Graph explained

A explanation of microsoft graph and Linkedin skills graph for the best workplace skills technology

MS Graph Deep Dive

Microsoft Graph is like a big connector for various Microsoft services.

It allows different applications to talk to each other and share information. Common sources of data it draws from include:

  • Email and Calendar from Outlook
  • Documents from OneDrive and SharePoint
  • Chat and Meeting information from Teams
  • User Information from Azure Active Directory

So, it’s a tool that helps bring together all the data from these different Microsoft apps to create more integrated and efficient experiences. A little big brother-ish but what isn’t these days?

LinkedIn skills graph

The LinkedIn Skills Graph is a system that LinkedIn uses to understand and show how different skills are related to each other and to various jobs.

It looks at what skills people list on their LinkedIn profiles, what skills are mentioned in job postings, and what is taught in learning courses on LinkedIn. This helps to get a clear picture of what skills are popular and important in different industries and jobs.

I don’t know how reliable it is, but it sounds good.

Will it work with your current tech?

The simple answer is Yes.

While specific details about all compatible systems are not provided publicly as I write this (smart move), key integrations include:

  1. Microsoft 365 Productivity Platforms
  2. Microsoft Graph
  3. LinkedIn Skills Graph
  4. Viva Learning
  5. Third-Party Apps

👀 The benefit for organisations

→ Transition to Skill-Based Organisation

Every company seems to be hot on this right now.

They should have been doing this all along in my opinion, but hey, I’m one guy with a keyboard. Reaching this goal is made easier when you have the right tech in your corner to support this push.

→ Clarity and transparency on real skills data

I hope this is a pretty clear one.

It’s hard for L&D and HR teams to get skills data, and it’s even harder to know how to convey this in the right way to an individual. The thing is we each want clarity on what skills we need to work on and how. Skills tech can facilitate this.

→ Awareness and engagement with skills and careers

Every L&D team chases the engagement dragon.

Like me, you’ve no doubt often been kept awake by the deep question of “How do we boost engagement with learning initiatives?”. Get people interested in skills and you’ll have more engagement than you know what to do with.

→ Connecting siloed systems and data

Don’t you just hate tools and data which can’t talk to each other?

It’s been a constant pain in my own career. The promise of tools like this from Microsoft is to centralise access in one place. Is it good? I’m not sure. Will it actually work? Not sure about that either.

Techwolf skills platform as a potential choice of the best workplace skills technology

Skills technology for non-Microsoft companies

I’m a man of my word, so here’s an alternative for you non-MS houses.

Check out TechWolf.

I have no affiliation with them or MS btw, these are my independent views on current tech, and I like TW at this moment. They made my top 5 emerging L&D tech solutions to check out too.

TechWolf’s technology is like an AI assistant that helps understand the skills within your company.

It digs into what everyone is good at, linking these skills to projects and learning paths.

It’s designed to work with the systems you already have, so there’s no hassle of adding a new platform (allegedly). It sounds like a useful tool for HR teams to make informed decisions about their workforce, based on real data.

📌 Things to know

  1. Integration with Existing Systems: TechWolf links up with the software you already use in your workplace.

    It does this through an API, which is like a bridge that connects different technologies. This means you don’t have to get used to a new HR system. It just becomes part of what you’re already using.
  2. AI Technology: It uses AI to understand and analyse all sorts of job-related data, like employee skills and job requirements. This AI figures out the context and meaning, not just looking at keywords.

Final thoughts

The bottom line is measuring skills is hard!

Recruiting tech to help you with this can make it a lot easier.

There are two industry-leading pros I’d recommend you follow in this space for more insightful thoughts on skills on the frontline today:

Before you go… 👋

If you like my writing and think “Hey, I’d like to hear more of what this guy has to say” then you’re in luck.

You can join me every Tuesday morning for more tools, templates and insights for the modern L&D pro in my weekly newsletter.

Categories
Learning Strategy Skills

How To Close The Skills Gap For Work

Ok, we’ve spent the previous edition in this series getting super nerdy about skills.

Find those here:

Now it’s time to get really tactical.

That means taking action people. We’re going to shift gears to unpack how you can close the skills gap not only in your company but in your skillset too. What a fabulous 2-for-1 offer!

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We know from our exploration so far that skills are the biggest barrier to business transformation for many companies. The same goes for each of us with our career opportunities.

If we don’t have the right skills, we don’t have access to the best opportunities.

Data from the World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs report in 2023 tells us that companies are focusing on the below practices to bridge skills gaps.

Let’s unpack the top 3:

  • Improve progression and promotion processes
  • Offer more money
  • Provide effective reskilling and upskilling

Only one of these is an L&D thing. I’ll let you guess which one.

3 key insights to help close the skills gap

Progression and promotion processes

This can be a very fickle conversation.

If you want a quick way to scare any line manager and HR partner at one time, ask about progression and promotion processes.

They’re almost like a secret central intelligence file that no one can view.

They exist, but how one navigates these is a mystery in most businesses. However, the pressure these days to be more transparent on just how the hell does one move from here to here has never been bigger.

In reality, we have a really easy fix here.

Just make it very clear and transparent on how all this works. As much as you can of course (calm down HR managers, I’m still looking out for you).

You’ll most likely solve 70% of issues here.

It’s never going to be straightforward but a bit of clear structure will go far.

Money, money, money

Let me be straight with you – I don’t have the answer to this.

I’ve been in the HR and L&D space for over 16 years. There’s never an easy answer to this.

It’s contextual to each person, company and moment.

I’ll leave it at that because this isn’t my zone of expertise.

Effective upskilling and reskilling

Finally, something we can get our teeth into.

We know how important this is for every human on this spinning blue rock to survive. So, forgive me for not covering this like many of the fluff pieces do.

Instead, we’re getting right into the components of a killer upskilling or reskilling programme.

7 practical steps to close the skills gap

I see too much junk on this topic online.

Too much focus on the how, aka the delivery of using ‘x’ tool to do this, and not enough on the what and why behind this.

You can’t have the former without the latter.

Here’s the basic principles to consider:

1/ Identify real business performance enhancers

Get clear on specific skills gaps within your organisations.

It doesn’t matter how you do it, just do it. This data is the bedrock from which you ensure your efforts are focused on the right things. Ignore the assumptions and biased opinions behind closed doors.

→ Engage with department heads and conduct surveys or focus groups with employees to gain insights.

2/ Understand employee aspirations

You don’t want to build stuff no one wants.

People often don’t know what they should focus on. Yet, you should still have your finger on the pulse of what the voice of the business is saying about the skills they value.

Employee surveys are useful data mines for this.

If you don’t have this, get out into your company to run mini-focus groups and surveys. You’ll be surprised what comes back.

Your goal is to align business and employees as much as possible.

3/ Establish clear objectives and outcomes

This should be obvious.

Yet, it seems to get lost in the excitement of the ‘how’.

Always know your measure of success. Without this, nothing else is worth much. You’re essentially throwing stuff on the wall to see what sticks.

→ Work with key stakeholders to define and review these. It’s a team effort after all.

4/ Practical application

Every learning experience should have this.

It’s the measure of value with any experience. We all need a safe environment and an opportunity to put what we’ve absorbed into practice.

This could take many forms including:

  • Stretch projects
  • Digital and real-life simulations
  • One-time scenarios and events

Whatever it is, you want to work with teams across your organisation to create something that best fits the culture and context of the work people need to do.

5/ Create a supportive environment

This is where leveraging line managers works well.

Often, I find, managers don’t take enough accountability for the development of their team. Too many are confused about their job. It’s not about the doing, it’s all focused on the people.

We can only be successful based on the environment we create and that others do too.

It doesn’t matter how much ‘learning’ or training’ a company provides. Without this practical application, it’s money down the drain.

Ideas for this include:

  • Line manager coaching and mentoring
  • External mentoring
  • Group Slack and/or Teams communities, or go rogue and do a real-life group session

6/ Evaluate and improve

Setting goals that you don’t track is dumb.

Sorry. It’s true.

I see this all the time. The common situation is to track none of the agreed metrics through an experience, only to wait until it’s complete and realise none of them was achieved 🤦.

Feedback and/or retro loops in every meeting are useful to combat this.

This doesn’t need to be heavy.

Spare 5 minutes at the end of every update meeting to evaluate where you are today, and how everything is performing and review if anything needs to be adapted.

Those 5 minutes could save you months of work and lots of money!

7/ Building Partnerships to cement success

This is all about social proof.

Nothing sells and cements the reputation of an experience more than endorsements.

Here, I suggest leveraging your senior leaders and well-respected team members to become part of your endorsement campaign. Imagine it like a political race without all the crazy backstabbing.

Case studies and personal stories work well here.

Speaking of case studies. Keep scrolling for inspiration from some of the world’s largest retailers.

Two case studies on closing the skills gap

🛒 IKEA: Upskilling 8,500 employees to boost sales by $1.4 billion

This is the most popular case study on the blog.

You can read the full piece here. Get the TL;DR below:

  • 8,500 call centre workers were transformed into interior design advisors.

  • Billie, the AI bot, effectively managed 47% of customer inquiries.

  • Sales through remote interior design consultations amounted to 1.3 billion euros(~$1.4 billion).

🥐 Carrefour: Upskilling 320,00 employees for the Digital World

This French Grocery retailer is on a mission to future-proof its employees for the evolving digital world.

Get the full case study here. TL;DR below:

  • Carrefour aims for a digital-first retail model by 2026.

  • The ‘Tous digital!’ initiative equips all employees, notably frontline staff, with essential digital skills.

  • In 3 weeks they upskilled 60,000 employees, aligning with EU’s 2023 Year of Skills.

  • Future plans include an exploration of emerging tech like Generative AI.
A 3-step framework to close the skills gap

Steal this framework for easy skill-building conversations

I’ve shared this before and I’m doing it again because the drum beat needs to keep going.

I find we never do enough skill health checks.

They’re the objects that grant us the power to improve our earnings and freedom, yet we don’t tend to them like you would a garden. Your skills need constant attention in the form of watering and pruning ya know.

Every quarter I recommend you do this:

  • Open a doc or grab a notebook
  • Create a 3-column table
  • Place these 3 headers – ‘expiring’, ‘evolving’ and ‘emerging’ in one of the column headers
  • Now, the good stuff. Reflect on your current skills and place each of them in the best column.

The power of this exercise enables you to:

  1. Chuck out the skills which no longer serve you and the world
  2. Double down on the skills that can give you a performance advantage
  3. Identify advantageous skills to add to separate you from the crowd

Be human skills-focused

As I say nearly every week, I’m all in for a human-powered future. Digital technology is a beautiful enabler, but it is nothing without humanness.

Your biggest advantage in this world is your human skills.

Technical skills are incredibly important, but your human capabilities are what makes the difference. I’m hoping this has come through in all the data and insights we’ve explored across November.

→ Unlock human capabilities at the heart of everything you build.

The Skills Trilogy: Today, Tomorrow and Always

Ok, we’ve reached the end of the first trilogy in the series.

Fret not, we have much more to come on the future of skills for 2024 before the year is out.

For now, feed your brain with the previous instalments.

  1. Today’s Skills: The 5 skills that matter most
  2. Tomorrow’s Skills: The skills we need to build to succeed for the next 5 years
  3. Always: How to build effective skill strategies (you’re reading it)

Bonus:

Before you go… 👋

If you like my writing and think “Hey, I’d like to hear more of what this guy has to say” then you’re in luck.

You can join me every Tuesday morning for more tools, templates and insights for the modern L&D pro in my weekly newsletter.

Categories
Artificial intelligence

Why Being Human Is Your Greatest Advantage In The AI Era

The question is no longer whether you can use AI for x.

It’s should you.

And if you do, where, when and how do you use it best?

I see about 100 ‘new AI apps’ weekly. They can’t all be AI-powered, but it’s getting harder to tell. There’s a weird blurry line where people are reaching to AI-first for anything, and I mean ANYTHING!

There’s a great deal, I believe, that you shouldn’t delegate to AI.

Especially for L&D.

I know this is a somewhat complicated statement from someone who has spent the past few years sharing the power, potential and promise of generative AI tools.

I love digital technology (which expands further than AI).

AI is incredibly useful (hence why I write about it so much). But I don’t want it to replace some of the most fundamental experiences that make us human.

Parts of the workplace learning experience fall under this banner.

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On the topic of working smart

AI tools have great capabilities.

Yet those capabilities are only truly unlocked in the hands of a competent and confident user. In my experience, we have very few of them.

We’ve covered a look into this before in my article on “The Hidden Impact of AI On Your Skills“.

The TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) being AI can help and hinder, and that choice is yours.

I know AI tools can help us work smart, yet the jury is out on how much is meaningful and if we learn how to amplify this in other spaces without AI.

Learning is an everyday behaviour, whether you realise that or not.

We call upon an ecosystem of tools, both digital and organic, to help us learn and put that into action. My fear (which is being confirmed more by the day) at present is that we have an over-reliance on AI tools.

This leads to less investment in the power of our mind, and thus moves us away from what makes us human.

Don’t get me wrong, a certain amount of cognitive offloading is great. You don’t want to outsource the whole thing, though.

You can’t apply AI to everything

Pick the right tool for the right job.

Solid advice, no matter the time or place in the world you find yourself.

It’s natural to get giddy about modern tech and experiment to see how it can help. Sometimes this can go in the wrong direction. Especially when leaders are misinformed or not educated enough on the tech.

I have an example of this in my work.

About a year ago, I worked with a client on an onboarding program, which, in their words, needed “a digital makeover”. At the time of outreach, I wasn’t sure what that meant. I had a few ideas, though.

One of those turned out to be true.

Their Chief People Officer (CPO) had seen an ad for a new AI-powered (allegedly) tool. The promise was to automate all the things that humans hate doing and provide a conversational mechanism for newbies to get answers through a ChatGPT-like interface.

They didn’t want to buy it, just create their own in-house version.

This is where I came into the picture. The ask was to build this product alongside them. However, they had made the most fatal of mistakes I cannot ignore.

They fell into the tool before the problem trap.

No one could tell me what was actually wrong with today’s onboarding process, or if there even was anything wrong.

All they knew was the CPO had seen this AI tool, and they needed to make it a reality.

Nothing new here, right?

It doesn’t work that way

With further conversation, I got a clear picture of the madness.

The CPO had convinced themselves they could use their AI-powered solution to fully automate the onboarding process and remove humans entirely.

Despite the fact that this wasn’t even possible, my questioning came to “Why would you want to do that?”. I never really got an answer to this, btw.

In the end, the project fizzled out due to money and time.

So, we never got to unpack whether it was wise to do this. My point here is that we have an already foggy view of what these tools can actually do, and a knee-jerk reaction to automate rather than collaborate with us.

This is where it goes wrong for any tech-assisted solution.

We race to discover ‘how can this tool do x thing for me’, rather than ‘how can this tool enhance what we do?’.

Human + AI

It’s funny how quickly we forget what makes AI work.

HUMANS.

I’m baffled by the AI-first rubbish I see on social feeds (I’m doing my best to cut down on feeds of late, fyi). I’m fond of the human-powered, AI-assisted or possibly AI-native.

However you look at it, we would be wise to seek collaboration.

That’s what brings me to the advantage both you and I have – our humanity. It’s the unique attribute or skill that enables you to leverage AI intelligently.

It’s well documented that left to its own devices, many generative AI tools can get themselves into all sorts of hot water. Without a human to provide guardrails and a sense check, tools can often cause more harm than good.

If I had a dollar for every time a poorly designed “AI automation” created lots of clean-up work for teams, maybe I’d be well on my way to my first million.

You are the essential ingredient in making AI work well.

The human in the loop

If this were one of those Marvel films, this would be the time when the superior spandex-laden superhero appears to save the day.

You might have heard of the concept ‘human in the loop’.

It’s commonly used to describe the essential human involvement required with any technology. Did you think all of those cool tools worked on their own?

If you haven’t, the term refers to human input into the development, training, and operation of AI systems. It’s about collaboration between man and machine, not one or the other. I believe this is the best way to work with these tools.

That’s why when I’m asked, “Will x take my job?”, I reply “It depends”.

It depends on whether you’re building a human in the loop (HITL) with AI-assisted tasks, and the answer is – you should!

The HITL approach leverages the collaboration angle I mentioned to improve accuracy, reliability, and adaptability of tech tools. You (the human) are the key ingredient in working with any technology. If you’re human skills suck, AI and other tools won’t help you much.

As humans, we provide key context.

Tools like Generative AI can do many wonderful things, but they can’t apply them contextually.

Not right now, anyway.

So, if you’re sitting there worried about AI taking your job – Don’t.

Until SkyNet rises and starts building Terminators, you have a clear place in the flow of work.

But ‘x’ tool said it can do blah blah

Maybe you’re not quite sold on this concept.

Here’s where humans enhance the tech partnership:

  1. Accuracy and reliability
  2. Context and understanding
  3. Ethics and accountability
  4. Continuous improvement
  5. Trust and adoption

Without you, technology can’t benefit from any of this.

That means it’s not much use in the long term.

How to use your human skills to amplify work with AI

Instead of repeating a bunch of what I’ve said over the years, here’s a curation of my most useful thoughts on this:

Final thoughts

I believe conversations like these are important.

As Ed Sheeran said, “I’m thinking out loud”.

If you fancy sending thoughts back, I’ll be here.

As we each continue to establish best practices with Gen AI use for work, getting clear on the level of human skills required to make this effective in any business is essential.

This image I shared on LinkedIn sums up the reality most of us face today.

Before you go… 👋

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