Don't Adopt AI For Your People, Adopt It With Them

“Alex Cullimore: Now you've just destroyed morale. At best, you might have to rehire a lot, a lot of people, which is a very costly endeavor, and how much trust are those people going to have knowing they're coming in to a team that just on a whim shuffled 4,000 people out the door?”

[INTRODUCTION]

Alex Cullimore: Welcome to Uncover the Human, where every conversation revolves around enhancing all the connections in our lives.

Cristina Amigoni: Whether that’s with our families, co-workers, or even ourselves.

Alex Cullimore: When we can be our authentic selves, magic happens.

Cristina Amigoni: This is Cristina Amigoni.

Alex Cullimore: And this is Alex Cullimore.

HOSTS: Let's dive in.

Authenticity means freedom.

Authenticity means going with your gut.

Authenticity is bringing 100% of yourself. Not just the parts you think people want to see, but all of you.

Being authentic means that you have integrity to yourself.

It's the way our intuition is whispering something deep-rooted and true.

Authenticity is when you truly know yourself. You remember and connect to who you were before others told you who you should be.

It's transparency, relatability, no frills, no makeup, just being.

[EPISODE]

Alex Cullimore: Welcome back to another episode of Uncover the Human. It is another hosts-only episode, and we are here to talk about the topic that's on everybody's minds, but with our angle on it, AI.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. But we're going to talk about it from a human readiness point of view. The question really is, are the humans ready? Are we ready as humans? And is the technology ready?

Alex Cullimore: We mean this both societally and organizationally. Because one thing we've been talking about a lot internally lately is in our experience in change and what we focus on when we go through managing people's change and trying to help people make transformation and evolution in their companies themselves is about human readiness. Are you ready to make that change? 

We often get to the idea of, “Oh, I should just do it. I know that I won't need to do that. I know I need to eat better. I should just eat better, or I should just do this.” It misses, I think, the point of actually being ready. AI both misses that point and we managed to find so many ways. By we, I mean the royal collective workforce.

Cristina Amigoni: The world.

Alex Cullimore: We have found so many ways to miss the point and miss the readiness for AI. I think it's time to talk about it. Let's talk about human readiness, what it means and what we can do to get it for ourselves.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. We can get to what makes humans ready. I do have a lot of thoughts on what doesn't. Start there. Or signs that humans are not ready. It's all going to go down the drain, all the money, or the investment, or the expectations, or your goals, especially all your quarterly goals, your sales goal, all of it, down the drain. You might as well not do it. There's more effort in actually keep pushing the disposer button as it gets clogged than actually doing it. Humans are not ready, when it's shoved under throats.

Alex Cullimore: If you're tired of plunging your failed AI strategy that has clogged your plumbing –

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. It’s funny we put more money on drainer. You may want to step back and ask the questions, are the humans ready, and what are the signs that they may not be, or they may be?

Alex Cullimore: Yes. This week, I've been reading headlines about Salesforce among many others expressing regret for the thousands of people they laid off, because they were sure AI was going to take over. That's one aspect of readiness that was clearly failed. The tool was not ready. The imagined idea of what AI could do was not true. That was not what was available to happen, much less what should have been happening.

Cristina Amigoni: It's beyond the tool. It's not just about the tool wasn't ready. Again, the humans weren’t ready. Because it's, you don't just bring a tool and then you're like, “Okay, we've got AI.” No?

Alex Cullimore: Yes. Not only was it not ready to replace the humans, the humans who were not replaced, not counting the horrendous morale impacts that you just made, the other humans that were supposed to work with AI that replaced their co-worker, Dave, they used to know and talk to and go to lunch with, they were not ready for the tools. The tools were not ready to make the jump. This was a massive flob in readiness. We saw this happen over and over. There are people who jumped the gun on jumping to layoffs, which that should never be your first impulse, even if you thought this was possible, even if you thought you could do this, which you should have known better.

Even if you thought that, you shouldn't have reached for the layoff buttons. Just click soapbox moment on that one. Why did you reach for layoffs? We invent tools to make things better for people, not to replace them. Let's maybe do better.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. It is possible to do better. You can even ask AI. It will say, yes, you can do better. It will agree with you.

Alex Cullimore: It will find ways to help you do that.

Cristina Amigoni: It will even create a whole plan on how you can do better. Yes. There is a way to do better.

Alex Cullimore: In seconds.

Cristina Amigoni: In seconds. Yes. That's a good use of AI. Figure out how to do better, so that you're not destroying human’s lives and destroying, again, it's probably going to take a few years or decades. But companies are still mainly made of humans. If you destroy the human and you don't consider the human in your plans, again, buy a lot of drainer. You're going to be unclogging all the stuff that you're throwing down the drain with the plans and the PowerPoints and the reorgs and the technology, and we did this, and the layoffs, and the list goes on.

Alex Cullimore: Now, we're in negative human readiness space, to the point where you're going to have to do so much work to get you back to a level where you would have started at. If you'd done this more human readiness in mind the first time. Now, you've just destroyed morale. At best, you might have to rehire a lot, a lot of people, which is a very costly endeavor and how much trust are those people going to have knowing they're coming in to a team that just on a whim shuffled 4,000 people out the door. It's pretty brutal. You've set readiness back tremendously. Readiness is also a good way of thinking about trust. Because if you're not ready, you're not going to trust people to make a change if you're not ready. You'll be ready when you do have the trust.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. That's definitely one of the benefits of readiness. A necessary piece is if you've destroyed it, you're going to need the trust before you can get ready again. Let's see if we can talk about, what does human readiness look like?

Alex Cullimore: We can use AI as the subject de jure for that, because let's think about what you really want from AI. There is the idea that it can make things more productive. I think a lot of people jumped in with the idea that it can replace people's jobs. But if you think about it, you could just augment people. If you use AI tools, you could make them 10 times more effective. They can reduce a lot of tedious tasks, give that to AI and not have to do some of the things that are unnecessarily taking hours. It could have been, and it can be, and I think it eventually will be a people augmenter. You will be able to use these tools to just better organize knowledge bases, schedules, shared information. It'll be able to generate some ideas for you, and you'll still have to do a lot of the checking and understanding of what you're generating. It can be a people augmenter. Let's talk about what it would be like to be ready for AI as a people augmentation tool.

Human readiness would look like, understanding that, hey, that's the goal, not replacing people. That would help a lot. It may help people understand the why. That's a big part of readiness. Why are we making this change and what do we expect to get out of this? The, what's in it for me? The ever popular with them for change management is, what are they going to get out of this if they make this adoption, if they jump in and adopt these tools and have AI as part of their workflows and processes and how can they effectively use that?

That then brings us to training. How are you going to do this? How are they going to know how to do this? How does everybody do it in a way that it's consistent and you're getting what you want out of it and they're not just getting used to replacing what otherwise should be critical thinking with AI and just sending out the output? How do you make sure that there's guesses checks on that, or checks and balances, I mean, on that? How do you make sure people are trained on how to use that? Those are just a few huge aspects of human readiness to make a change, like adopting AI. What else would you add?

Cristina Amigoni: I would add, actually, looking at how people work today, understanding that and figuring out if AI is taking these tasks, then this part of the work, both individually as a team and organizationally, how do we need to evaluate and perhaps, restructure how people work? How do they communicate with each other? What are the actual responsibilities and the roles? Is there a possibility to change teams and how teams are formed? Because now AI is an individual in the team. Is there a possibility for changing our goals based on what we want to achieve?

Is there a possibility for changing how departments and teams communicate with each other? Because now there's an additional presence of AI in this. It's not just, oh, add AI and you're done. That's when AI implementations fail. You're not done. It changes people's lives. Part of that with and the why and all of those things is thinking like, okay, if my identity was to do this task and now 70% of it is done by AI, what is my new identity? How does my new identity fit in the team context of everybody else's new identity? How does that fit in the department context of departments having new identities?

There's a whole, from individual to organizational view that needs to be looked at from and understand what's happening today, insert AI, what changes are needed? Now, how do we make those changes, well, again, there's better ways to do then. How are those changes not done in a just do it type of thing, and in a, well, figure it out type of thing when people don't have the authority to figure it out, because it's not their decision to move teams, or change a department, or change goals. This is the opportunity to actually making the humans ready to add a new team member practically, perhaps, manager and you resort, like it's a whole being in itself.

Alex Cullimore: You had to know with role that's intended to feel, understand what do you actually want AI to do? Because we've seen so many companies who were like, “We just need people to use AI.” And so, they do things track usage of AI. At which point, you just have people logging on, submitting a query to ChatGPT and be like, “There, I used it. I'm done.” Does that help anything? No. Nobody's getting any ROI out of that. It's just showing like, “Hey, yes. I'm part of the adoption. Please, don't fire me.” Which is a totally understandable thing to do, but you're not measuring anything useful and you're not getting anything useful out of it.

The whole just do it idea really falls on its face, the second you haven't figured out what role this is supposed to take. What is it even supposed to do for your team? What would you like it to do? For that matter, how do you figure that out? How do you help the people who want to go experiment with this? How do you share their knowledge? How do you see what's a good experiment? Putting some guardrails on that, so that people understand that, as well as they're able to understand what the outcome of that is.

Okay, this can help replace some pieces of this task, or process. What do we all do now and to make sure that A, we are using that effectively and B, what do we do now if that was part of what we were doing before and now we have time freed up to do something else? What does that look like? Where else do we concentrate? Where do we get even better value out of this? It can be a huge, I think, boon to all kinds of things, because it could do things quickly as long as you have the right checks and balances on it and you have people using it appropriately. How do you get to that end goal? Not just using it for the sake of using it, not just saying you're an AI powered something with no thought, or intent put behind it. How do you actually make it useful, and how do you convey to people that this will be useful?

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, exactly. How do you convey that they still matter? Because that's the fear, the biggest fear in the AI revolution is I no longer – and it's proven by thousands and thousands of people getting laid off in the last year or so, because AI being the excuse of it for the layoffs. But what's the fear of, how do I contribute now? What is expected of me? Where's my identity in this, with this new thing that can do 70%, 80%, 100% of the tasks that I used to do? Really looking at that and understanding, how do we talk at the individual level about this? Not just at the organizational level, not with some number of like, we just need 20% of our workforce to be using AI five days a week. I’m like, that doesn't mean anything.

Okay. I've created five images of cute penguins going on bicycles in the air. There, I used AI. It’s like, make it real and then understand what that does for the humans. Again, human readiness is considering the humans first. This is a tool, okay. This is going from we have bicycles and horses to cars and planes. Great. How do we want people to use the tool? It's not how does the tool change, dictate who gets to travel now? How do people use the tool? 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. How do you use it in ways that don't just replace brains, because it's proven that it can't quite do that. It can't replace some of the collaboration points. It can't replace how you need to use things. It can help get your responses quickly to help generate things. I love your example of the penguins in the air in a bicycle, because that is the most AI thing I've heard. We can generate that in a second. That is a perfect example of useless AI. It didn't mean anything. It's just a use.

Cristina Amigoni: I got cute penguins.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. There is value to that, I suppose.

Cristina Amigoni: There is value to that. Yeah. There's definitely value to that. I may or may not spend a lot of time generating random images just to see how cute they come out.

Alex Cullimore: I think there's things that you can do with it. Think about what you actually want to achieve with it. It's a flexible tool, but it doesn't replace critical thinking and you need a lot of critical thinking to use it well. How do you get people who are still the kings and queens of critical thinking, or can be if we let ourselves be? How do you help them use the tool well? I like the analogy of cars, because you didn't get cars and then assume that like, now I don't need people. You just got cars and assumed you could get places faster.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Exactly. Also, you don't get cars and planes to replace your bicycle and your horse, and then use that to do everything. I would want to see how you can deliver newspapers that you used to do on a bicycle and on foot with a plane on everybody's footsteps. That's not a thing that happens anymore. Let's talk about, I don't know, Amazon packages. I would love to see how you just replace the human and the vehicle of today to actually deliver individual packages in front of individual homes with a plane.

Alex Cullimore: Mm-hmm. It's not to say, that might not be a very helpful thing to eventually do, but it doesn't mean it can be done right away, or that it should be – you should fire all your delivery drivers right now, because maybe one day it'll happen. Maybe one day, we'll have self-driving cars too, but in the meantime, I'm going to have to ask my kids to go get a driver's license.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, exactly.

Alex Cullimore: It would be great. I would love to not have to drive, but that's not there yet.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, exactly. I had this conversation actually this weekend with my brother. He has a small child and he says, it may be that when my own son, my nephew, grows up getting a driver's license, it's not going to be a thing. I don't actually believe that. But it may be a thing that it doesn't become necessary anymore. It becomes optional. But we're not there yet. My 14-year-old in the meantime and my 11-year-old are going to get signed up for driving school and it's through their time.

Alex Cullimore: It's still probably a useful skill and will be for decades to come, even if we can slowly make actually working self-driving cars, which we're closer than we have ever been, but that's not to say we're close.

Cristina Amigoni: No. Exactly. Maybe let's not shut down all the driving schools yet.

Alex Cullimore: That's the perfect example of jumping the gun on human readiness. None of this was ready. A bunch of companies basically went and fired all the driving instructors. Why? Why did you do this? First of all, just to not think of the human cost of the morale and trust you were going to lose by doing that, much less, it never materialized any of the savings that you thought were going to somehow make up for the fact that you just destroyed the culture, even for the remaining people, even for the world fire to be – happens every time you have layoffs, and AI is an even more demoralizing one, because people are worried they're not going to be able to find the next thing, because too many things will have been replaced.

Thankfully, that is not born out and I'm hoping that means there'll be a lot of people finding jobs who have been struggling for the last few months to find those. What a thing to do, to just destroy trust. You can do a lot better and you really have to think about human readiness for any change, especially something like AI, where there's so much fear, concern and absolute unknown at every level.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Absolutely. It's that. That's the human readiness. It's like, yes, this is a great plan. This is a great technology. This is a great whatever you want it to be. I've never seen a more beautiful PowerPoint. The strategy that makes so much sense. Like, of course, you can do all these things and AI can help with scaling from one location to 400 in six months. The humans can't do that. That is not humanly possible. Is it possible on paper? Absolutely. On paper, I can go live on Venus, and then come back to miss the winter.

Alex Cullimore: I made this mistake in the job that we met at. I was doing the automated data conversion of old platforms to new platforms. I knew that if we could get the automated thing to work, we could get data converted in a matter of hours. I'd heard that it was – that one of the differentiators was that we can implement faster than other platforms, which is a big deal in platform changes that take a long time. It would have been very helpful.

I thought like, man, I'm going to solve this with technology. I'm in charge of this automated data conversion. I know that we can get there and we can basically convert people's data in a matter of minutes onto this new platform. That's not what was missing. It's humans being ready to use the platform and being able to use it and having it actually replace the functions that it needed to replace and their day-to-day habits and processes and have it do it well. The technology can move as fast as possible. The actual human readiness was the sticking point and that's what needed to be solved for. I made that mistake. I wholeheartedly went forward. I just was on the technical side of things. I was thinking about things from a technical point of view and I did the technical job of it. It just isn’t the same as everything being ready.

I can generate a PowerPoint in seconds with AI. That's great. Is it the right PowerPoint? Does it actually get the meeting? Does it do the pitch for me? No. I have to go use these things, and then to actually make them usable for other people. Make sure they are understandable. That human readiness portion is always present and AI gives us a thousand opportunities to forget that. We're going to trip over and stub our toes every single time we do.

Cristina Amigoni: We're not saying, don't use AI. We use it.

Alex Cullimore: No. It’s very helpful.

Cristina Amigoni: We are constantly exploring new ways to use it, new tools. We're maybe not as close as some techies, but we're keeping up with like, oh, now I can do this. Great. Let's try that out. When is it a good time for us to say, oh, this completely replaces our knowledge base, or this completely replaces this? We don't replace it first and then figure out what it means and how we actually work with it. We're looking at it from like, this is how we're working today. Which pieces make sense that could provide the efficiency and the speed, while still maintaining our own roles, varied and growth and changed, but how does this actually help us from a human perspective first with having a new tool?

I remember, we're considering a new tool in a couple of days that we're going to get a demo on, and this same conversation we had in September and my first reaction was like, I wholeheartedly believe this tool is the next great thing.

Alex Cullimore: Could be super helpful. Yes.

Cristina Amigoni: It could be super helpful. Right now, our team does not have the capacity to even consider this, because we're in the middle of finishing our book, a book launch, finishing major projects, having multi-hundred people workshop coming up that we have to get ready for and deliver. This is not the human time. The humans will not be able to absorb any of it. They will resist it. If we do want to do it in the future, we're not going to be able to either then. No. Not right now. It's coming up again. Okay, now that we've had rest, the holidays, we don't have any major projects at the moment, wait 60 seconds, something will come up. But for now, talking about this tomorrow is possible to see what is the human readiness and capacity to absorb this new tool, and how are we going to use it?

Alex Cullimore: Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate that distinction, because I'm not advocating for not using AI. I think there's a lot that can be helped. I'm just saying that because of what we think it can do, if we don't test those assumptions and if we're not careful with it and if we're not careful with the rollout the same way we should be with any rollout and any change, and if we don't consider the human readiness, we'll end up stubbing our toes every time. There's absolutely ways to make it happen at it will be very helpful to happen. It'll be a very commonplace part of life in the next three to five years. It'll be incredibly commonplace. Everybody will be fairly used to these things and fairly used to these tools.

It doesn't mean you can jump in right now, but it does mean that you can start with it and it will help, and you should always consider the human readiness of any change, especially something like this where there is so much human suspicion, rightfully so, for how it's been treated so far.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, exactly. Think of the humans. Are the humans ready? Are you ready as a human? That's the first question.

Alex Cullimore: Yes.

Cristina Amigoni: If you can't answer, if you're already as a human, then there's a good chance with most everybody else around you isn't ready either.

Alex Cullimore: Yes.

Cristina Amigoni: Do you understand how this is going to change your own life?

Alex Cullimore: It's okay to not know if you're ready yet and to go do the little exploration. You should go do a little exploration and figure out what it would look like to be ready, or when you'll be ready, or whether now is the time, or if it's just something to say like, oh, I want to keep this in mind, but now is not the time, like you said with our experience in September.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. Exactly. Good luck.

Alex Cullimore: Good luck. Go forth in AI humanly.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Humanly. Thanks for listening. That's still a human thing. Well, AI can listen too, but it's a different thing.

Alex Cullimore: Hopefully, you're getting more out of it.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Yeah, exactly. Until we process this to come up with something else. But yes, you'll get something out of it.

Alex Cullimore: AI, just make this a 15-second summary for you, now that you've listened to this far already.

Cristina Amigoni: See you next week.

Alex Cullimore: See you.

[END OF EPISODE]

Alex Cullimore: Thanks so much for listening to Uncover the Human. We Are Siamo, that is the company that sponsors and created this podcast. If you would like to reach out to us further, reach out with any questions, or to be on the podcast, please reach out to podcast@wearesiamo.com. Or you can find us on Instagram. Our handle is @wearesiamo, S-I-A-M-O. Or you can go to wearesiamo.com and check us out there. Or, I suppose, Cristina, you and I have LinkedIn as well. People could find us anywhere else.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, we do have LinkedIn. Yes. Yeah. We’d like to thank Abbay Robinson for producing our podcast and making sure that they actually reach all of you. And Rachel Sherwood for the wonderful score.

Alex Cullimore: Thank you guys so much for listening. Tune in next time.

Cristina Amigoni: Thank you. 

[END]