Unlocking Innovation with Generative AI: The Human Factor
The power of generative AI is determined by your people
By Nicole Dreiling, Tara Montano, Shane Swor, Kyle Wolff, and Hudson Breaud
Innovation.
We all want it, but how can we quickly achieve it with today’s ever-growing busy schedule?
Enter, you guessed it, generative AI (GenAI). This technology has the power to transform the way we work, create the perfect artistic masterpiece, or even draft marketing content in mere seconds. However, GenAI doesn’t innovate solely on its own. A current topic garners conversational real estate: our people.
How can we join our thoughts, imaginations, and strategic direction with the horsepower of GenAI to drive the sustainable results we hope to achieve? Our people will help to uncover these answers within our organizations. Humans are the ones that prompt, facilitate, make decisions from, and work with the outputs of GenAI; this is how we can innovate more quickly. Without involving people in the transformation journey (e.g., ethics, responsible use, change management, training, etc.), you lose the full power of generative AI for your innovation efforts.
Why humans are needed to leverage GenAI
Human interaction and input are required for generative AI to provide meaningful value. To achieve this, people need to be at the center of any GenAI solution — identifying training parameters, further tuning foundational models, engineering prompts, and driving adoption at scale. Most GenAI solutions are created through building, training, and tuning a large language model (LLM). This is costly in both resources and time. By prioritizing education and upskilling employees to solve for business needs while leveraging GenAI capabilities, an organization can unlock significant value and ignite transformation.
Utilizing generative AI allows for true organizational transformation. It can influence talent management, operating models, overall strategy, and ways of working. Through strategic human interactions with GenAI, organizations have the ability to capitalize on benefits such as a quicker go-to-market deployment, enhanced customer-employee interactions, personalized customer experiences, automated routine tasks, and improved decision-making.
How to set up your people for success
To help ensure optimal employee engagement, below is a list of top human factors that we recommend evaluating across the organization to increase adoption rates and GenAI proficiency.
Leadership direction:
Align leaders throughout the organization on the vision, desired return on investment, and anticipated outcomes for implementing and using GenAI solutions. Communicate the benefits, risks, changes, and success metrics to motivate and empower employees to adopt generative AI technology. Cascade messages such as the “Why,” “Why now,” and “What” to instill a sense of calm and preparation for future changes. Enable your leaders to set the example in utilizing generative AI effectively.
Human judgment:
Utilize human judgment and critical thinking when reviewing generative AI outputs to vet the accuracy of the production. Organizations should be cautious in accepting immediate results because artificial intelligence can lack context, nuance, and situational awareness. Humans are needed to program, create, and define the uses of AI tools.
Upskilling:
Analyze the impacts on people, processes, and current technology. Upskill teams to grow into new roles, responsibilities, and performance expectations. With a targeted focus on augmenting human capabilities with generative AI, organizations can invest in skill development as part of a comprehensive talent strategy to allow people to focus on even greater tasks than before.
Bias awareness:
Promote transparency by sharing awareness of general potential bias in data collection. Create strategies to drive fairness and information accuracy that align with your overall organizational goals. The power of AI is only as strong as the data inputs and benefits from a human review focused on bias elimination.
Accountability:
Establish human responsibility for generative AI outputs and ensure processes are in place for monitoring, improvements, and solving for unintended consequences. This influences a shift in mindset and newfound time for employees as they move from creating content to managing and verifying outputs. Establish a governance and operating model to ensure human accountability is established with outputs.
Governance and operating model:
Assemble a strategic, human-centered operating model designed with the appropriate structure, talent needs, metrics, and roles to ensure quality, performance management, and corporate guidelines are followed. Consider the roles you currently have in place and those that will need to be created to utilize generative AI as intended.
User experience:
Design outputs with humans in mind or update them for a clear and concise user experience. To ensure that people can effectively interact with generative AI, allow the user to customize throughout the interaction, and enable users to provide feedback in the generated outputs. It is helpful to remember that the user experience is a unique environment where human workers and AI collaborate on tasks to achieve business outcomes.
Cultural alignment:
Assess the gap between the company’s current culture and the desired future state. Whether outwardly expressed or vocalized, many workers are nervous about adopting GenAI solutions and see the potential as a replacement for their skills. Lead the way by inspiring the organizational culture of innovation, new strategic capacity, and collaboration with generative AI. An innovative culture opens the door to providing AI benefits like empowering employees by simplifying processes, generating contextual insights, and streamlining options.
Communications:
Share transparent communications early and often about your intentions with generative AI. Include the benefits, impacts, ethics, risks, and expectations of AI tools within the organization. Clearly and proactively set the tone and pave the way for quelling myths and managing anticipated perceptions.
Combining humans with GenAI to transform organizations
We unlock an unprecedented future state for our organizations by empowering people with GenAI tools. People play a huge role in the success of GenAI ingrained within your company. Humans will prompt it, work within it, and make decisions from GenAI outputs. Ultimately, do they trust it? Like many significant organizational transformations, it starts from the top with a strategic leadership direction toward adopting new technology and desired behaviors.
By leaning into the human factors described above, you can encourage the adoption of GenAI, build accountability, and establish a level of comfort needed to become successful throughout your organization with GenAI. People in your organization will learn new skills to build the future. With enough support, people will experiment and explore innovative ideas using GenAI.
Inspiring a culture of innovation, learning, and trying new things allows employees to explore and capitalize on the benefits of generative AI. Leaders can guide by encouraging adoption, trust, and ownership of inputs and outputs.
Slalom is a global consulting firm that helps people and organizations dream bigger, move faster, and build better tomorrows for all. Learn more about Slalom’s human-centered AI approach and reach out today.
