How Could AI Make Our Work More Human?
It seems like AI is everywhere these days. Though it’s been a topic of conversation and exploration for many decades, a tipping point has been reached recently that has thrust AI firmly into the limelight of public and workplace discourse. People are buzzing about the potential value that can be created through this technology, and now it’s not just your colleague but your neighbor who is raising these ideas.
However, the conversation oscillates between progress and caution. How do we best harness this tool to drive innovation? But also, how do we protect and empower human thriving when many jobs will become obsolete?
Amidst this mixture of conflicting views, there’s a more nuanced discussion taking place: how can we best harness the power of AI to complement and unlock human creativity and value in various domains?
But for me there’s an even more intriguing question to ponder: could AI actually re-inject humanity to our work? I know, it sounds like an oxymoron, but hear me out.
Humans are intricate and emotional beings, unmatched in complexity. We communicate in rich and nuanced ways, often relying on subtle verbal and non-verbal cues to express thoughts and feelings.
We can be deeply surprising and utterly rational in a single moment. So how can algorithm-driven machines possibly help us become more human? The answer lies in the potential for AI to complement our strengths and help us overcome our limitations.
This article will explore four opportunities for AI to help make us more human in the workplace. Each opportunity presents enormous potential, as well as risks and challenges. We will look at how AI can help us be more empathetic, increase our emotional intelligence, promote diversity, and foster human connections.
Make Communication More Empathetic
The first opportunity for AI to make us more human in the workplace is to help us communicate more empathetically. Empathy has become more than a buzzword in the workplace, with more and more business leaders recognizing its importance in fostering well-functioning teams.
However, while the power of empathy is now better understood, most team members and leaders are still unsure of how to grow this skill at the individual level and foster it at a group level.
To communicate with empathy, we need to start with a deep understanding of the stories, perspectives, and feelings of those around us. But often we either don’t have access to all of these data points and signals, or simply don’t know how to incorporate them on the fly into our communications with our colleagues.
This is where AI can assist by analyzing various data points about an individual’s history, preferences, and real-time state to provide us guidance on how to communicate well. With a more nuanced understanding of an individual’s current emotional state and specific needs, we can approach conversations, emails, video calls, task assignments, etc. with much more deeply empathetic clarity.
Imagine if each of your colleagues could communicate with you in a way that accommodated for a current stressful life situation, your current workload level, your optimal daily timing, and your most preferred channels. All without needing to explicitly share more than you want to directly with any individual.
This is the type of scenario that could be accomplished through the use of AI, and multiplied by the number of daily interactions that take place in an enterprise, the value is staggering.
Equally impactful could be the use of AI in customer service to analyze a customer’s tone and sentiment to understand their emotional state, prompting more empathetic and personalized service experiences.
Or in healthcare, where AI could analyze a patient’s language, tone, and nonverbal cues to provide doctors and nurses with a more comprehensive understanding of their patients, in order to provide more personalized care, improve patient outcomes, and enhance the overall healthcare experience.
While the opportunities here are endless, there is a risk that if not implemented well, these AI-driven responses could feel formulaic and robotic. Would human-to-human interactions lose their authenticity and spontaneity if they become too reliant on machine-generated guidance? Finding the right balance between AI assistance and genuine human connection is crucial for making communication more empathetic in the long run.
Increase Our Emotional Intelligence
The second opportunity for AI to make us more human in the workplace is to increase our emotional intelligence (EQ). While the first idea above is a subset of emotional intelligence, our EQ is much more than empathy. It encompasses a wide range of skills that help us navigate our relationships and emotions. These skills include self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, stress response, and decision-making skills, among others.
While emotional intelligence is recognized as a fundamental aspect of what makes us human, it is also a skill that can be improved with practice. And, as with any skill we practice, we can see significant benefit from support.
AI has the potential to be our digital coach in this journey, just as we benefit from coaches in sports or at the gym. AI can provide structure and guidance to help us recognize the moments where we need to better exercise our EQ muscles, and give us tips on how to flex those muscles.
One simple example is in giving better feedback, a process where many different facets of our EQ come into play. Firstly, we often fail to recognize these moments, but with an AI coach beside us we can be more likely to give feedback when it’s needed. But secondly, we often don’t know how to provide feedback in an effective manner (or worse, we do, but we lack the backbone to take those sometimes tough steps).
But with an AI-coached approach we can provide feedback in ways that are constructive and support the growth of our colleagues (or gives us that extra motivation to have the tough conversations we are shirking). This practice and guidance not only supports that one moment, but leads to a steadily heightened EQ, paying dividends in many future interactions.
Even more importantly, these approaches can help us better receive feedback and develop a posture of humility and learning, often the more challenging side of the feedback coin.
Feedback is just one example of the hundreds of ways that our emotional intelligence skills are deeply impactful to the success of our daily work and relationships. AI could help to be our guide in many more ways related to our EQ.
However, relying too much on AI to increase our emotional intelligence comes with its own set of risks. There is a danger of becoming overly reliant on technology to guide our emotional growth, which could lead to stagnation in our personal development. Additionally, AI may not always capture the subtleties and complexities of human emotions accurately, which could lead to misguided advice or recommendations.
Therefore, it is essential to strike a balance between leveraging AI as a tool for emotional growth while continuing to rely on our innate human understanding and intuition. By doing so, we can benefit from the guidance and structure provided by AI while continuing to develop our emotional intelligence through authentic human experiences.
Increase Diversity
A third opportunity for AI to make us more human in the workplace is to increase diversity by reducing the human biases that are deeply ingrained in every business process and relationship. These biases often result in a lack of diversity, which means we’re missing out on the valuable perspectives and ideas that come from a wide range of voices.
What if we could use AI to help us make decisions that promote the flourishing of diverse individuals and communities?
There are numerous decisions in the workplace where AI could potentially reduce biases and lead to more inclusive outcomes. For instance, in hiring and promotion decisions, AI-driven tools could analyze candidates’ qualifications and potential without falling prey to the unconscious biases that humans often exhibit.
AI can analyze job descriptions to identify and eliminate language that could dissuade certain demographics from applying. Additionally, AI can monitor the interview process and provide feedback to ensure that all candidates are evaluated fairly and consistently.
Another example is in performance evaluations. AI can analyze performance data and provide feedback to managers to help eliminate biases that may affect their evaluations. This can lead to more equitable promotions and compensation decisions, as well as a more diverse and inclusive workplace.
However, using AI to reduce biases and increase diversity is a controversial idea, mainly because AI systems have already exhibited biases. AI models learn from data, and if the data itself is biased, the AI will perpetuate those biases. For example, AI systems used for hiring have favored certain demographics or perpetuated gender stereotypes.
Therefore, it is crucial to build better guardrails around AI models to ensure they’re as unbiased as possible. This may involve using diverse datasets, implementing rigorous testing procedures, and continuously monitoring AI performance to identify and address biases.
In a recursive cycle, we can leverage AI itself to progressively reduce biases and promote diversity in our decisions and processes. As we continue to improve AI systems and guardrails, we can make strides towards a more equitable and inclusive workplace that truly values the perspectives and contributions of all individuals, regardless of their background or identity.
Prompt Moments of Connection
The last opportunity we’ll examine for AI to make us more human in the workplace is to prompt human moments and foster deeper human connections. This sounds deeply paradoxical, but here’s the irony: in our current work culture, we are the robots — far too often caught up in the machinery of our workflows to recognize the humanity we’re surrounded by.
Even without the use of AI, we’ve made ourselves and our teams cogs in a machine and we are struggling to make deep human connections. And remote and hybrid work environments can exacerbate this challenge.
To address this challenge, AI has the potential to nudge us toward more deeply human interactions by suggesting prompts and reminders. These prompts could be in the form of reminders to take a break, suggesting a coffee chat with a colleague, encouraging a team-building activity, or reminding us to express gratitude to a coworker. By doing so, AI can be the catalyst for fostering more human moments in our daily work lives.
By using AI to prompt these human moments, we can foster deeper connections and enhance our work lives with the human touch that we so desperately need. AI-powered prompts can help us break free from our robotic motions and engage more meaningfully with our colleagues, regardless of our work environment.
It is important to remember that spontaneity is an inherently human quality. So there is a risk that AI-generated prompts could come across as forced or artificial, undermining the very purpose of these human moments. It is essential to ensure that AI-generated prompts don’t feel too intrusive or inauthentic. Ideally, AI should provide gentle nudges and suggestions, leaving the ultimate decision and execution to the individual.
Implemented well, we can strike the right balance between leveraging AI to prompt human moments and allowing human connections to develop naturally. By doing so, we can use AI as a tool to enrich our work lives with more authentic and spontaneous human connections.
Embracing AI to Rekindle Our Humanity
In conclusion, AI is a groundbreaking technology that has the potential to revolutionize the way we work and interact with each other in the workplace. While there are undoubtedly risks associated with using AI to enhance our human qualities, the potential benefits are too significant to ignore.
It’s crucial that we approach these technologies with caution, but also with a sense of hope and urgency. Our workplaces desperately need the human touch, and AI can be a powerful tool in helping us rekindle our humanity.
Throughout this article, we’ve explored four opportunities for AI to make us more human in the workplace. By using AI to increase empathy, emotional intelligence, diversity, and human connections, we can create a more compassionate, equitable, and inclusive work environment. AI is not some panacea that will solve everything for us, but like every other tool we’ve used before it, it can be a helper to achieve these goals. Even the goal of becoming more human at work.
The future of work is deeply human, and it is up to us to ensure that we leverage technology in a way that enhances our humanity and brings out the best in us.
Crewjoy is building an AI-powered platform to make our workplaces more human, in each of the four ways named above. To learn more about Crewjoy and join the waitlist for our beta, check out our website.
