Are you building an AI-driven business that scales?
I enjoy reading the LinkedIn articles by the Microsoft Chief Marketing Officer Jared Spataro. He writes about AI at Work and its impact on our lives, which has also been a topic of mine for a while. I am interested in learning how AI changes organizations and how different job profiles change over time.
In a recent article, Jared asks how "Intelligence on Tap"will change teams, businesses, and work. He compares AI to a resource such as electricity, which is readily available for all of us to use at an affordable price. I pay $20/month for ChatGPT and $20/month for Perplexity, which has become my go-to partner, especially when researching. Furthermore, we all recognize that AI will reshape the workforce, and we need to understand what that means for us, both in our work and personal lives.
Microsoft recently released an interesting study, "2024 Work Trend Index Annual Report,"which builds on the idea of a new type of organization, which they call a "Frontier Firm." This type of organization is a combination of human and digital workers that can scale instantly to meet the needs of the business. The article refers to AI agents that can handle complex cognitive work. The assumption is that digital workers can be added without adding physical human beings. Jared states that this allows organizations to dramatically expand with every individual at a much lower cost. This is a departure from the historical organizational model, where scale was typically achieved by adding more people.
The interesting question we all should pose is this: How does our organization change if we view AI Agents and Agentic AI as the foundation for organizational change? What would it take for our organization to "think outside the box" and re-imagine our work? What would change, and how would each of us have to work differently? Is your competitor already thinking about this and even moving towards an AI-driven business model?
I summarized the blog entries in my article, including numerous articles on organizational changes. I have been especially interested in how software companies must reflect on their software pricing/packaging and how AI will impact business models, especially software vendors.
When I reflect on how organizations use AI, I see we are at the beginning of the changes. There have even been reportsof office workers who have AI available for them burning out. Still, senior management has set unrealistic expectations of the productivity gains people are assumed to get by using AI.
Employees use solutions such as Microsoft Copilot, which can tremendously help filter information from the never-ending emails we all get every single day. In recorded Microsoft Teams meetings, Copilot can help uncover all the facts discussed in the meeting with summarization and action items. But the question I have posed multiple times is this: How many people are truly educated to be efficient with these tools? As a technologist, I have already used solutions such as ChatGPT when it was in preview and have become a real fan of Perplexity, which has replaced mostly my use of search engines such as Google or Bing.
Jared summarizes well the findings from the Work Trend Report as follows:
Humans turn to AI for its unique strengths, not to replicate human skills. AI provides capabilities that humans simply can’t: it’s available 24/7, can generate ideas almost endlessly, and can process vast amounts of data almost instantly. This isn’t AI supplanting human agency—it’s AI supplementing it.
This is what organizations should strive towards. We still need humans to think and make decisions on things that AI can't. I recently reviewed a book by Pascal Bornet et. al. "Agentic Artificial Intelligence: Harnessing AI Agents to Reinvent Business, Work and Life".
The book is fascinating. It was written by twenty-seven professionals from business, academia, programming, and research, united by a shared vision of how technology can serve humanity. I highly recommend this book as it covers AI from multiple perspectives and is based on fresh research and practical development.
Jared summarizes his LinkedIn article eloquently as follows:
The shift to intelligence on tap represents one of the most significant business transformation opportunities of our lifetime. Over the next few years, companies of all sizes, in all industries, will reimagine how work gets done and how value is created. Intelligence on tap will create opportunities for any organization to innovate in ways that surpass what we ever thought was possible.
I encourage you to be curious and learn how AI impacts you, your company, and what you need to do to ensure that you stay on top of AI-related things. I made a decision a while ago that AI is something I need to understand and advise others on what kind of impact it might have on different things.
Yours,
Dr. Petri I. Salonen
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