The answer doesn’t lie in tech, say industry experts, but in people. To effectively integrate AI in the workplace, companies need to take a human-centric approach to its buildout, which means investing not just in tech, but also in upskilling employees.
“For every dollar that we spend on technology, we should spend three more on people, to help them to transition into the future,” Carrión added.
Johnson & Johnson rolled out a mandatory AI fundamental course for its roughly 80,000 global employees, Yeo said, while providing other master classes catering to different personas in the organization.
Companies can also look to AI to enhance productivity in back-end processes, experts said.
Piloting the tech from within the organization helped to create a safe sandbox for experimentation, said Will Brown, the head of human resources at Standard Chartered. It also served as a litmus test to gauge how employees feel about AI adoption in the company.
“It created a dialogue where people were openly having conversations on how they felt about their bosses writing performance summaries with the support of generative AI,” Brown said.
The bank has also rolled out an AI-driven talent marketplace, where workers can upload the skills they possess and wish to learn, while managers can post open calls for projects requiring workers with specific skill sets.
This creates a “gig-based economy” within the organization, Brown said, enabling skills to flow more quickly across it.
After experimenting with different use cases for AI, companies should home in on a few and scale up use. After “sprouting a thousand flowers across the organization,” Yeo said that J&J found that only 15% of AI use cases were driving 90% of its value.
Yet academics like Connie Zheng, an associate professor at the University of South Australia, have likewise cautioned against the indiscriminate rollout of AI across entire organizations.
Managers need to first evaluate AI’s utility. If not rolled out prudently, it could increase “techno-stress” and deteriorate employee well-being. Year-end performance reviews, for example, should be left primarily to humans, Zheng argued, adding that employees, especially Gen Zs, love feedback from managers.
To reward and promote workers, supervisors need to be genuine and conversational—“and I don’t think AI can do that,” she added.
