Artificial Intelligence :: How not to destroy your company culture

chatGPT sparked the AI race into warp speed leaving companies, legislators and everyone else partly paralysed about what that is going to mean to everything we know. Gugin has helped companies create the right company cultures for more than 20 years. We have never witnessed a situation like this before where so many companies, organisations and political bodies have asked what this is going to mean for their organisation, its values and even its future.

The good thing is nobody knows and everybody is sharing the same fear and the same aspirations. Based on our experience and our recent research we do have some ideas about what might be going to happen. Read on

This article is about how artificial intelligence will affect company cultures. What happens when the hero in the organisation is no longer a senior person but a computer? What happens when your boss tells you that he trusts the computer more than he trusts you? What happens when you get fired because your job can be better done by a computer?

Uncertainty, fear and opportunities surround artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is not new. We just talk more about it and it is moving into areas where it directly affects more people’s lives. The driverless car is an example. They have the potential to be able to eliminate the majority of all accidents on the road. So now you can drink and drive without the risk of hurting anybody. We like that idea because it obviously helps us. We have known this kind of artificial intelligence from the aviation industry for decades, where planes predominantly rely on the judgement of computers when flying. The development of artificial intelligence in planes has improved safety tremendously.

If today we had the same safety level as in 1970 a plane would crash every 15 minutes. This year to date only 363 people have been killed in 87 plane crashes. In 1970 2226 people were killed in 298 accidents. As you can see in the graph below the number of passengers has grown from 310 million in 1970 to nearly 4 billion in 2016.

So artificial intelligence is good. At least as long as it doesn’t take our jobs and offend our professional or emotional pride.

The fact is that many entry-level jobs are already being replaced by artificial intelligence. Law school graduates have trouble finding jobs at law firms because the work they used to do is done much better by computers. Hospitals are experimenting with having computers diagnosing patients instead of doctors and machines can already perform certain kinds of surgeries much better than we humans can.

Artificial intelligence is all good – or is it?

As it is easy to find the areas where artificial intelligence helps us make things easier, safer or quicker is slightly more difficult to see the negative side effects. Often – if we see them, we tend to downplay or even neglect them completely.

Deployment of artificial intelligence is like pressing toothpaste out of the tube. Once it is out you can’t get it back in. So I believe we have to carefully assess how far we are willing to go with the use of artificial intelligence. Just because we can go an extra step doesn’t mean we should necessarily do it.

I do certainly not neglect the positive effects of artificial intelligence when developed and used correctly, but below I will allow myself to be the devil’s advocate in assessing what artificial intelligence can do to a company culture if it gets out of hand.

Company culture and artificial intelligence

One of the general definitions of culture is “the way we do things around here”. Company culture is like any other culture. It is a collection of behaviours, values, norms and basic assumptions tied together with mutual trust and experience and a common view of the outside world, its opportunities and threats.

This very complex non-verbal inter-human interaction is crucial for us human beings. We are NOT rational creatures. We are emotional. We fall in love, we hurt other people in anger, we get jealous, we hate, and we admire role models and heroes. We have a need for affiliation, we seek recognition and we define ourselves by how we are in relation to other people. These are basic human characteristics, which are not going to go away.

When we at Gugin facilitate a company cultural change we look into all these aspects plus a lot more. We look at what people dream of and what they fear. 

More people have a fear of becoming redundant, a fear of being replaced by a computer. That fear leads to mistrust in the people around you, the management and the company itself.

If you don’t feel safe you change your behaviour. and when you change behaviour you change the culture. And this is precisely what has been happening with some of our clients over the past couple of years.

The fear among the employees and middle managers is implicit but nevertheless very present because we can measure the change in behaviour. They are afraid of sharing knowledge. They are so scared of asking for help and this way reveals that they don’t know everything. That change in behaviour leads to a decrease in quality, lower customer satisfaction, higher employee turnover and eventually lower profitability.

The artificial intelligence dilemma

The use of artificial intelligence creates a dilemma that all companies should be aware of and relate to.

If you don’t take advantage of the new technologies you will lose a competitive advantage because some of your competitors will use the new technologies. They can produce and sell the same products or services cheaper in better quality and delivered faster. So pretending the good old days won’t change is not a good strategy if you want to remain in business.

On the other side of the dilemma, you might lose the motivation of your most important asset – your employees ( and perhaps customers) if you deploy artificial intelligence and other automation technologies as fast and intensively as possible.

Last month we conducted a survey for an airport lounge, that has just implemented automatic boarding card scanners for its guests instead of being greeted by a human being from that particular airline. The airline implemented the automatic scanning of boarding cards to save money on having people sitting at the welcome desk.

We interviewed 600 passengers over 2 days. 78% of passengers would rather talk to a human being, and even wait a few minutes rather than scan their boarding card themselves in order to get access to the lounge. It is because human interaction is fundamental to our well-being as human beings. As human interaction is becoming seldom in many places we value it even more. This is probably why 65% of the passengers we interviewed stated that the automated registration of them when entering the lounge will have a negative impact on their overall rating of the airline.
Previously we have seen similar figures when companies are trying to replace inbound call centres with automated solutions.

Deployment of artificial intelligence solutions is probably going to follow the same patterns.