I’m an artificial intelligence (AI) enthusiast. I have been ever since I learned about how it could optimize my work and make my life easier. I converse with it all day, both personally and professionally.
As happy as I am to use this technology, I know many others feel differently, sometimes out of fear of the unknown, sometimes for philosophical reasons, and sometimes due to concerns about the technology’s environmental impact.
In many, if not most, organizations today, AI is becoming a have-to-have/must-use rather than a nice-to-have/optional part of work life. What do you do when a valued, high-performing employee is reluctant, or even outright refuses, to use it?
Fear of Lowering the Quality of the Work
AI isn’t infallible. It’s only as good as the prompts you give it, so if you don’t explicitly tell it to only use the information you gave it to do a specific task, it may pull in information gathered from other sources or even make projections or extrapolations based on its best guesses. This is a danger that employees using AI must understand and be trained to avoid. But is it a risk that should push a company to say the technology should not be used at all?
When an employee is hesitant to use AI, they often express the fear that the technology will not be as conscientious as a human would. What is the best way to respond to this concern?
The first response that comes to mind, which I have said to myself and to others after my many reflections on AI, is that humans aren’t infallible either. How many mistakes do humans make, even when we’re trying our best to be careful?
A gateway experiment to getting AI-resistant employees to give it a chance is to ask them to have AI double-check their work. If they’re in my field, publishing, ask them to feed their completed articles into an AI tool such as ChatGPT (preferably the paid version, though the unpaid version is also usually adequate). If it’s their first time using the technology, help them write the prompt. Ask them for their feedback once they see the results of the AI’s assessment of their work and its suggestions for improvements.
Another helpful illustration is to have an employee test the human-only version versus the human + AI version of work. For example, you could have them test a marketing e-blast created solely by a human against that same e-blast created by a human optimizing AI. See which one generates the best results.
Philosophical Opposition: The AI Bots Are Taking Over
There was widespread booing at commencement addresses this spring when speakers noted the power of AI and the important role it would have in the new graduates’ professional lives. New graduates didn’t see it as an opportunity as much as a pending disaster that would take away jobs.
If employees are afraid of losing their jobs to AI, the best way to address that fear is pointing out how AI might help them hold onto their jobs. The manager could highlight the positive impact on revenues the technology will have on efficiency and cost savings. For example, AI can generate images, so a company may no longer need to invest in a stock photo account for marketing images. That cost saving could add up over the course of a year to thousands of dollars, depending on how much imagery is used.
What could such cost-savings offset? The hiring of another employee? What kinds of new, more interesting tasks could an employee engage in when AI has freed them from the more repetitive, basic duties?
Might there be an opportunity tied to the AI itself, such as learning to write the best prompts possible for as many work tasks as possible, and then standardizing those prompts across the company?
If fear of employment opportunities for humans is the concern, show employees how just the opposite could be true.
How Do We Offset the Negative Environmental Impact?
The water and energy used to power AI is a common fear. I have a friend who refuses to use it primarily for that reason. Is there a way for an organization to answer this concern?
One thought is to have an organization that relies heavily on AI find ways to offset this impact by making other adjustments such as reducing the use of paper and plastic or providing incentives for employees to carpool or use mass transportation. An organization also could have employees participate in environmentally friendly activities such as doing a beach cleanup together, planting trees, or working with a local organization to take actions that help protect animals. For example, they could participate together in capture, spay/neuter, and release program for feral cats. That helps both cats and the local bird population.
The potential negative impact of AI is substantial, but the benefits of the technology are so great and promising that the technology itself may be best positioned to develop solutions to its own shortcomings and risks.
I have even started telling AI my goals for what I want it to do and then having it write its own prompts!
What combination of education and training will enable your managers to get even the most reluctant employees on board with using AI?