Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Overview
02:48 Why AI Change is Different in the Workplace
07:02 AI Change and Organisational Transformation
13:23 The Impact of AI on Decision-Making and Personalisation
19:03 Leadership and AI Integration
26:08 Barriers to Successful Human and AI Integration
33:41 Opportunities and Watchouts with AI Change
42:04 Conclusion and Closing Remarks
Leisa Hart (00:06.84)
Welcome everyone to the Humans and AI in the Workplace podcast. Over the last few years, it's become clear that artificial intelligence, AI, is one of the most impactful and disruptive transformations in the workplace. As a leader, you may be wondering how to get started and how to do it in an intelligent way. Or you may be stuck on how to overcome some of the people issues and human bottlenecks your AI has crashed into.
We are here with Dr. Debra Panipucci and Leisa Hart and a special guest, Cheryl Vize, Chief Operating Officer at Red Marble AI to discuss why AI change is a different type of change in the workplace.
Welcome to the Humans and AI in the Workplace podcast. I'm Lisa Hart. And I'm Dr. Deborah Panipucci. And today we're speaking with Cheryl Vize, COO of Red Marble AI. And Cheryl is an expert in technology change and adoption, driving global initiatives that revolutionise business at a large scale. She excelled in harnessing emerging technologies such as AI to reshape work processes and empower the human workforce. So welcome, Cheryl.
Thank you. Thanks for having me. So tell us about your role in Red Marble AI and also why you've been in this space of intelligent technologies for the last few decades. Now everybody understands how old I am. Look, all of this has come out of curiosity, but starting with Red Marble. So Red Marble AI, I joined the organisation about four years ago. I'm now a partner in the business and that came out of curiosity. So whilst I'm the chief operating officer, we are still a relatively small
niche services business and consulting in the space of all things AI from innovation all the way through to governance. But my role in that from a client point of view is really looking at AI strategy change and governance. And so I manage most of the delivery for the organisation and the teams that are out there working with our clients. Great. So we started talking with you guys a few years ago now. Yeah, we were all coming out of different change environments and transformations.
And those transformations were to do with organisational tech that had reached its end of life. So we're now at a point where we're starting to put back into the system, I think. It's a great time to be curious in this space, as you say. I think it's a great time to be us. Like we've seen it all. I've seen the beginning of, and this again will show my age, but you know, the beginning of the internet and then, you know, Google coming online. Some technologies have come and they've gone and others are going to stick and this one's going to stick. Absolutely.
So that's a great segue into our first question for you. And this episode is really for leaders, why AI change is a new type of change and disruption in organisations. So we know AI is transforming the workplace at an unprecedented pace and scale in most industries, either overtly or more behind the scenes.
Having worked in transformations over many decades now, what have you seen that's different about AI change in the workplace, Cheryl? For me, there's been a change in the opportunity to actually realise some of the things we've wanted for a while. if I look at all the aspects, this is more of a cradle to grave change. So we're seeing it across all elements of a business. We're not just seeing it in like tech or we're not just seeing it you know, in the front line or in the sales group, we're actually going to see this permeate through a lot of software that's already embedded in an organisation and processes, but we're also going to see an uplift that actually occurs. So for me, the big things that we're seeing is better integration and automation. And for that, it's going to be about streamlining tasks. And I think about that from a process point of view, some of those connectors are going to be much more seamlessly able to be integrated.
I think we're finally starting to see what data can do for a business in regards to decision making. I think that's really important. I think we've all had analysts work within our organisations and depending on where they got their data from, how they sourced it, they would pop up with an answer. Data is much more accessible now and from a non -biased point of view, you can sort of look at it from an analytics and process point of view in a completely different way with these type of tool sets. So I think decision making is going to be one of the big opportunities for leaders to actually take advantage of, to inform their decisions, not take away their decisions, but inform their decisions. I think we're going to be able to pick and choose. So personalisation becomes a reality with this tool set. And for me, that's about providing a whole lot of things out there that people can pick and choose to actually do the heavy lifting within their roles, within their functions. And as a result, it's not about taking on more, but being able to personalise the way I want to work and not be guided because the system works a certain way. So I'll be able to pick and choose more. It's going to happen really fast is the other point. so keeping up or choosing when to jump in and take something out and engage will be quite important for leaders to think about, especially with their people. Like not all change is good. And so how are you going to actually integrate that into your plans and make it palatable?
Probably the big thing for me and the thing that I spent a lot of time talking to boards and executive teams about is the governance and ethical side of this because these models, they're not black magic boxes. They are designed by humans, but there's intelligence within them and understanding how that intelligence was created, how it learns from inputs that is coming in and out of that environment. It's really important to be able to create transparent and explainable tech.
And I think this is the first time we're going to see executive teams and boards really have to actually understand and deliver on that when requested. But we are going to see an impact to employment. We're going to have five generations of workers in the workplace. so we're going to see this like amazing opportunity because we're going to have people that come out of university or out of high school and into the workplace and they're going to expect a certain way of working from the gecko versus an aging workforce who's going, my God, I've got to learn a whole lot of new things and feeling probably quite overwhelmed by change. And then we've got everybody else in the middle who are all at different phases and there's different maturities across different industry sectors. So that's going to be a big change. So they would be my sort of categories of where I think and why this is sort of going to be fast and it's going to be scalable because it isn't just one element within an organisation or a function. It's actually going to be across the board. Can I ask in zeroing in in a part of that, in the past, leaders and organisations have looked at change as a project. Very defined, it's got a start date, it's got an end date. It used to be that there was only one big change a year and now there's like hundreds going at the same time.
In your experience of what you've seen in taking AI into organisations, how is this new AI coming into organisations and looking at the way they automate and redesigning the workplace? How have you seen that different to the way projects have been done? I think what we're seeing because of the way third party software is being rolled out at the moment. we'll just take the big example, which is co -pilots.
And I use that term very loosely because it's copilots across a number of big systems, but Microsoft's pretty much nailed their first implementation of this. So a lot of organisations are trialling the tech. And what we're seeing is just through those trials and having that be available within a common work suite, which is, you know, my mail and my meetings and being able to transcribe meetings and sentiment within meetings and things like that, we're starting to see leaders actually go, my goodness, this technology actually can help me understand an environment, my team, it can start to do some of the heavy lifting. So I think we're gonna see adoption because things are just made easier, which I think is fantastic. So they won't even have to, it'll be more, I saw somebody do that, I'm gonna go and do that myself and it's just gonna be available and I can pick and choose if I turn it on or off or I actually engage with it. I think what we'll see differently now from a project's point of view is change is always from my point of view being seen as a lot nice to have and not a must have. And what I think leaders are going to have to cope with is that five generations of workers. Whilst it'll come through the third party software, what we'll also see is that change needs to be planned for and digested. And we'll have to give access to workforces to get used to something that may be what's perceived as highly technical, but it will fundamentally change the way of working. the organisations we work with, we're usually working with an early adopter. We're working with somebody that's got an innovation and strategy mindset. They're already seeing what the opportunities are. They're getting requests from up above, from an organisation's hierarchy to say, well, how are we going to apply this technology? So there's that natural curiosity occurring and investment happening that way.
What we're also seeing, I sit in a lot of meetings and I facilitate a lot of sessions with leadership groups. And what comes out of those sessions within the first sort of 10 minutes is that you ask who's using this technology and you give examples of the technology's names and the applications and things like that. And pretty much most of the room is already starting to integrate and use these things in their day -to -day life. And it blows their minds of the executive going, my God, we haven't even got an addressable usage policy and we haven't even thought about this at a government and people are already using this tech within our space. So it's usually a shock at that point. So I love a good fire occasionally. So it actually puts, yeah, it puts things in perspective for executives that this is going to happen regardless if they want it or not. And they've got to start to think about how they want that to occur within the organisation. And a lot of it's around protecting both their clients and their data that actually supports the organisation's role. Yeah, there's quite a few things now that are good examples of intelligent technology coming into our lives where there hasn't been those guardrails and those policies and that structure and social license about how this works and disrupts our life. Social media is probably a good example of that where there's some great benefits but there's also some significant downsides. When you think about that coming into an organisation, that's an environment where executives and boards and leaders have courage and responsibility for that. So I feel like there's a lot more responsibility for them to be thinking about the governance and the ethics and the responsible side of AI coming into their team more than any other technology that we've had exposure to before in the workplace. Yeah, I totally agree think The big challenge is that in the past you could sort of say, want a solution that does this and you would give it to the technology group and your product might be a digitalised product so it ends up online or it's consumed externally. And it was sort of a black box to a lot of leadership teams because there was somebody that owned that function and they didn't really have to explain how the connectors all work together.
This technology does require the framework and the explainability and traceability because if you want to use it in a certain way to help decisions and look forward from a forecasting point of view and that you've got to know what you're putting into the recipe and you've got to know what it retains to learn and use for the next time. And so, you know, what we'll see is the first steps into this will be very cautious, but we're already seeing it used across big data sets from an analyst point of view and all the rest of it. And that's been happening for quite a while. So there's a lot of maturity in that space. But what we'll also see is the discussion from a leadership point of view about who designs the system, creates the bias within the system. So what goes in, junk in, junk out. So all of those concepts need to actually be understood. So leaders will need to actually sort of going on a bit of a learning curve to understand that it's not just one type of AI tool. There's a lot of patterns with AI. You can do different models that do different things. Some are very closed models. Some are very open. That's a whole episode of its own, to be quite honest. Yeah, just understanding the basics is all a leadership team needs to do because then they understand where it and how it may apply. And then that starts them on the journey. So. And decision -making basics too at the heart of it, right? Because
In the past, a lot of decisions made by leaders have been based on gut instinct. And now it's based on recommendations coming out of systems, coming out of AI algorithms that have that inherent bias, but it could be someone else's bias. And now they're making decisions based on someone else's bias. yeah, really understanding the decision -making process and the frameworks around all of that is becoming more and more important.
I think also the way you think about a problem too. I think critical thinking comes into play now like it never has before. So the interesting thing for me is the coming up through the education process and, you know, leaving whenever you leave, you know, you're going to have to apply critical thinking when using this type of technology, because you're going to be asked to think differently. You're going to be asked to break something down, create a prompt. You're going to be asked to break something up into a set of steps. We saw ourselves move to go and remember the first view of Google that appeared. And you'd write a whole sentence, I would like to find an article on such and such. And I'm still teaching my 80 year old mother to actually like just use keywords. Once you learn keywords, then you'd never write a sentence again. This technology is the same. You'll learn to use it in very short, sharp. At the moment, there's still a lot of people saying please and thank you, which is great. But the system also has the opportunity to be used from an empathetic point of view. So I think that's fantastic.
So it can normalise and humanise itself if you allow that sort of construct to come into the workplace, which I think is really important because it's a guidance and add -on to the human sitting behind with the knowledge. But yeah, critical thinking to me and how you're going to break those things down and how you look at things will definitely change the way the workforce needs to operate using some of this tech. There's definitely a role for leaders to understand how they play a role in supporting their teams to create that transparency. So not black box, but white box, I think is what it's called. It should be called a clear box. Yeah, clear. like that. Transparent. Clear box. mean, transparent. But with that comes a lot of challenges, obviously, when you're surfacing information that people have had control over and...
Well, knowledge is power. And that's how our workforces have all been promoted and rewarded. exactly. So that's a big change in mindset. I worked on a project a couple of years ago around the adoption of a significant intelligent technology and huge changes to the business because most of the people that use different parts of the process, the technology was there to augment was really around relational and control and making magic with numbers to make things work. And some things weren't necessarily visible and transparent to others. So there was quite a lot of disruption in terms of fear of what that meant. But at the heart of it, what I was coaching their leaders around was what we have to get those people to understand is the relational side of their engagement with customers is absolutely fundamentally important. What they have to get used to now is that there's information that they have had in the past that is now visible. And so they also get better access to more information that they didn't have. So yes, you're losing something, but you're gaining a lot more. And those foundational relational skills are still really important with customers. How you're servicing the customers through the use of that technology is going to be supercharged. You do have to get used to or over the fact that you feel uncomfortable that you don't have the control and you can't hide things like you used to. But there were a lot more benefits. I think that's sort of a two prong issue though. I think what we're finding is that this next generation who sat behind keyboards, sat on their mobile phones and all of that, it's going to be the rise of the soft skills again. And so all of the things you're talking about in regards to engagement and problem solving and articulating yourself beyond the keyboard is going to be really important. So that social aspect will need to be heightened because if you're going to then rely on the technology, so there's got to be a trust element built with the technology. That's the junior workforce, the early entrants and things like that, which could be quite challenging. I think on the other side of that, there's got to be also a trust built in the knowledge that's coming out of these types of environments and trust built. If I'm going to use this data,
I'm going to use it in new ways or I'm going to add it to data that I've already got access to. I want to know that it's actually giving me the right information and interpreting things correctly so that I'm guiding or supporting the conversation. Yeah. So the, comes up for me when, when you say that is a significant difference with this change to previous changes is at scale, leaders have to be able to help their people understand where they still have autonomy and where they have clarity and certainty over what they're doing and leveraging their sense of importance in the work and the expertise that they have and where that fits within the context of what the intelligent tech is doing relative to what they are now doing and how they can look at that and go, well, that actually helps me. That does extend my capabilities and that does mean I can do different work. I think that's the role of the leaders in a way that we haven't had to do that before for other types of changes. Do you think that's fair comment, Deb? Yeah, and where they can step up. So we were talking to Patrick in another podcast and he was talking about how he's seeing the humans play more of a strategic master agent role with AI agents and tech underneath doing the tasks for them. So I think like in a superannuation call center for as that example, you know, that's the perfect place for that human agent to go, okay, so there's recommendations coming through from the AI. Yes, I can say these things because these have come from our best practice. So I know they're the right things to say, but there might be also other things that they, as a strategic kind of overarcher, overseer of the AI can look at in relation to how all of the different AI pieces of plugging together because you have your sentiment analysis in there, you've got your recommendation text coming through, you might have the past data coming through of the conversations that this person's had. So as the human agent that's strategically sitting over at the top of it, they can make that holistic kind of view and decisions in relation to it with all the different AI agents contributing.
As I heard you say all that, I'm sitting there going, I was an agent and somebody presented that, all the components to me, I'd probably be feeling quite overwhelmed. How am going to keep up? Because this is all going to happen in real time. But what we'll see, I think, the design side of the system be designed around the things that I want to as an agent have access to. And I'll probably add.
And this is the personalisation aspect. I'll probably add them piece by piece. I'll build trust with one element of it. I can then turn that off and on. I can toggle it on and off for one of a better description. But at the same time, I'm going to be given much more autonomy to engage somebody in a much more personalised way because it will be listening, being the environment, will be listening to the questions, the sentiment, the answers and then shaping the opportunity that you could have to have a richer conversation. So I think that's going to be really interesting how that plays out. But the leaders are going to have to sort of sit back and design it to start with. And I think not to overwhelm the workforce, I think they're going to have to add these pieces. You're going to have your power users. And I think that's always going to be amazing if you've got those early adopters who are curious about everything, but you're going to have to teach a generational generation of workers to actually work with the technology. And depending on where you are on that linear curve, some people will be at the end of their careers and knowledge has been their power all the way through. They're probably not going to adopt all these aspects. We hope to create curiosity around it, but at the same time, it's also going to be up to leaders to get their teams, their workforces interested and actively leaning into this technology. But it's not going to be for everyone.
And AI is not the solution for all technical issues, by the way. The use cases around the adoption of AI are quite specific and they're isolated at the moment. We're not seeing them as end to end experiences yet. We're seeing them very much be put in to deliver a element of a process or a element of an experience so that it can be enhanced. So definitely humans are guiding this. Humans are shaping this. Humans will continue to curate this.
So I think one of the things that I've just been reflecting on as we have that conversation is that, you know, we have this saying that we use all the time with our clients, which is, it sounds really simple, but it's actually a real important guide, which is you have to make it easy for people to do the right thing. And when we say the right thing, we mean ethically, all of those things, plus do what they need to do in order to build the habits and the behaviors that you want long term and sustain. So that pathway has got to be really carefully designed to have all of those inclusive design principles to cater for the variations of the generations that you're working with. And it doesn't have to be overly complicated. You've just got to sit and do that, go slow thinking now to go faster later. But one of the things when we talk about why is it that this system or these changes will be better for someone is one of the big opportunities that we've seen with some of our clients is that ability to aggregate multiple systems into one sort of simple dashboard where it straightaway people can say, or see that they don't have to go to multiple different, have 10 or 12 or 14, I think it was tabs in one organisation open to do their work every day. Now they just had two or three.
And one of those was surfacing a whole bunch of information and aggregating it and delivering it faster and more proactively and suggesting next best actions, et cetera. That for me is a really key way of showing how easy it is for people to do the right thing. Like if you do that thinking in the background and have that in mind to go, well, you don't have to have all of these tabs anymore. Here it is. And it's just going to make that step easier.
Yeah, that's going to come out of two things, I think. So third party software, it being turned on in your systems today is going to make it easy for adoption and starting to digest. I think what we want to see though is also how do I actually, instead of replacing all of these different systems, how do I actually just access them and use this technology as an overlay to create a new experience? I think that's where the magic really will happen.
And that's going to come down to good architectural practices and actually stepping back, not replacing tech for tech sake, not replacing it because we have to have an AI element. need to be out there in market telling people that we're using AI or anything like that from a strategic value point of view. Eventually you'd want to stop talking about AI and just sort of say, our experience with this product, our experience in this interaction, et cetera, is guided by our technology and our technology is underpinned by infrastructure software and the software has some intelligent software within it, which today are the AI tools that we're starting to bring online. in some ways I want to stop talking about the tech and actually talk about the experiences that are going to be created because that's where it gets sticky. Yeah, I like that. So what are some of the biggest barriers you see for successful human and AI integration with the work that you've been doing over the decades? So I think what we're going to see is that there's still a lack of understanding. So we've just talked about that. There's a whole lot of things coming. It feels very overwhelming. Every newspaper I read, every online article, every newsletter, every LinkedIn set of posts, everybody's talking about it. So it's pervasive and it's in our faces every day. So people are feeling like they have a lack of understanding. So it's about how do you actually create understanding and sort of demystify that. So I think that's one of the first barriers we have to get through.
I think there'll be cultural resistance and so I think people will naturally resist this change because it's going to change the way I work. It's going to potentially affect my job security, which is the big one that most executive teams are trying to work out how to respond to that because yes, it will affect some roles, but what will happen is new roles will emerge.
You know, we've been through this before. This is not the first time we've seen technology change the way of working. And with every one of those changes over history, we've adapted. But we'll have to go through this adaption process. And, you know, maybe in four years time, it feels like, did we ever work that way? And so we'll have those moments as well. I think I've been banging on about data for all of my work career and for most of the organisations I've worked in for most of that, nobody owned data. So the rise of data ownership, access to it, the quality of it, the purging and the cleaning up of data, and we see organisations are hanging onto data for much too long and that's not usable or relevant and in fact is a security issue. The data quality and accessibility will become something that will challenge most businesses because they haven't done the work over the last couple of decades. And in fact, it's still very messy. There's a lot of good organisations out there doing a lot of good things, but it's still in pockets. It's not necessarily enterprise wide and it's not necessarily scalable. So you'll see the finance teams and the analyst teams have really good data. And in fact, they've actually been the one organising things and, now we're going to want data to be used across the enterprise. There's a lot of ethical and privacy concerns. So there's going to be, you know, we're already seeing that with legislation and frameworks that are globally being rolled out to deal with the technology because countries and organisations are concerned in regards to letting the genie out of the bottle. And we've seen that already. We've got some big names out there talking about the negativity of this technology if it's not managed and guided well enough. And as a global technology different countries will use the technology very differently. And so that will challenge the commercialization of this technology within product sets and things like that and what we can and can't do and where it can be applied. So we're already seeing that, you know, if you're going to globally operate and use the technology that you're going to have to basically make sure that you're compliant with that country that the service is rolling out into. So your products are now global and you're to have to address it which also suggests that the education, philosophical underpinnings of the way we educate would need to shift as well. Because when we were going through university and school, was always the things in bold were always the most important and they would be the ones that were asked on the test. You just had to remember the things in bold. But like you were saying, now it's how do you interpret the sentiment and the concepts within that text to apply to different situations, to critically analyse and think about the way that they work together and don't work together, to be able to go into an organisation where you're not just looking for the bold and repeating that back to your leader, you're actually being asked to do more critical thinking and analysis and being able to pick up and audit errors and things like that. Yeah, I think we've trained a workforce to have an inbox and almost blindly process it and then put it in an outbox. I think you raise a really interesting point about critical thinking. That inbox is now intelligent and you're going to have to look and interpret and deconstruct and reconstruct because the AI will help you draft but you're the person that needs to curate that. And so a couple of us were talking over the last couple of months and we sort of came up with this drafting to crafting.
love that. So the drafting will be the heavy lifting, but you'll still be responsible for crafting. And that's not necessarily the way we've been training workforces. You know, this is your function, this is your job. You get it from here to here. You process using, you know, a sort of heavy set, set of processes and workflows. Now that will be available dynamically and that's going to be really interesting time. I think what comes up for me around that is
You know, we've all seen people in organisations who've been promoted year on year for their technical ability, but they haven't necessarily had the leadership abilities or the ways of engaging people or understanding people or understanding their own behaviour. I think this will be one of those changes in the workplace that'll put more pressure on those people to learn how to be more emotionally intelligent, learn how to interpret, you when they're crafting their email, what is it that they're adding to it so that where it's landing, the human that it lands with is actually wanting to engage with that. So they recognise that they've got to level up their skills. Yeah, I think that's probably part of the barrier because that's soft skill requirement. that term by the way. Okay. yeah. It's because it's not. It's not a soft skill. agree. Yeah.
And also the crucial skills more than ever before. of now we reshape that word to be We've been trying to own that from softer to crucial skills because intelligent technology will in every way as it has already done in our lives anywhere put more pressure on human relationships. So those crucial skills are even more important than ever before. Yeah, I totally agree. So our crucial skills as we move into this new way of working are going to be heightened. And I think that is that that's part of the resistance that I think we'll feel straight away because we haven't been educating that way. We say it's important, but at the end of the day, we're still rewarding people academically for being able to regurgitate information still and getting it right versus how they thought about it, how they approached a problem, where they got to in regards to an output, et cetera. And I think that's going to be something that fundamentally changes. So leaders are going to have to look out for that. So how do we teach that? How are we going to encourage that? How are we going to show what good looks like? I think that's going to be part of the challenge because we don't necessarily have courses out there to support that at this point. when it comes to thinking about humans and AI in the workplace, we ask every guest that we have what their wow is.
So what are the wins? What are the opportunities and the watch outs? So big wow for me is going to be personalisation and both an employee and a customer experience. I think they're going to be the big wins. I think we're going to see better engagement. I think we're going to see more relevance. I think we're going to see more personalisation because that person at the other end of the phone or at the other end of the experience has some more information to support the transaction or the experience. So think that's going to be one of the big wows. I've now got my own personal assistant back. So for me, just the heavy lifting on all the mundane bits and pieces, and these are things I'm choosing to get it to help me with, is going to be a big win for people. People are going to create more space and time. Now what we do with that time is also probably one of the watch outs, but we're going to create space.
And for me, we're gonna have to be careful about how we use that space. The third one for me in the wow, cause I've got three, would be decision -making. So I think we're gonna see better decision -making because people actually have to correlate data and actually look at data to support their recommendations, their answers. And I think that's just gonna be something that we expect that good decision -making is actually not biased, not because I have a gut feeling or not that I did it before this way and as a result that's the answer again. I think we're going to see much better decision making. So that's my wow. Great. that's my win, I mean. That's your win, yes. That's my win. There's two others. Yes. So what are the opportunities? Talent development and re -skilling. I think this is a huge opportunity. think, and in fact, it should become one of our principles and part of our cultural principles in all organisations is to say,
This human workforce is amazing. How do we continue to enhance and re -skill? And as I said, we're to be dealing with five generations of workers. So I think that's something that has to be addressed right now. One of the things I love about talking about the five generations is what underpins that is those inclusive design principles that need to come to bear so that you're getting access to the talent within each of those generations that you're working with right now. Because without those without understanding how to create environments and mechanisms for people to feel included. You're not going to get access to that, the greatness that comes from that diversity of not just within a generation, but across the generation. Another opportunity I see is actually AI driven innovation. So I have an amazing friend in Germany who is an industrial designer and she's using AI tools to help accelerate that front part of the creative process in regards to conceptualising ideas and formulating them. I also spoke to a friend who is an architect and whilst he is quite senior these days, he can see the advantages of actually using this technology to conceptualise things a lot earlier and a lot quicker and allowing them the creative process to move from there. So starting at a different point in time.
So I think AI -driven innovation is going to be something really exciting from an opportunity point of view. I also think we're going to see an agility occur within organisations. So we're going to see some of those big challenges organisations have to move at pace, be sort of liberated because of this technology. You won't have to go and wait for the data set to be created and then delivered to you.
You won't have to, you you'll be able to do a lot of this from your desktop if organisations want to construct their businesses in that way. So we'll see an opportunity around enhancing agility across an organisation. And watchouts? the watchouts, ethically. Like for me, it's the governance, it's the bias, it's the ethical concerns. The watch out on job displacement is a really key issue that needs to be addressed and this needs to be addressed at board level, at executive level, at organisational structure level. So I think that's critical. Organisations are going to have to rethink their structures because this is the first time we're going to see a technology actually effect structure, I believe. In the past, we've sort of bolted on technology rather than now sit back and actually reflect how are these roles, how is this function going to change? And I think we'll see organisational change, but job displacement is probably one of the big concerns.
And then security. Securities is going to have to be at the top of everybody's mind. But again, not all data is equal in this regards, but yeah, security and making sure you're managing the risk. But that comes down to also sensitivity and thoughtfulness of approach and actually sort of valuing that. So going back to our critical skills, you know, really teaching that as part of the process and educating people in a way that actually uncovers that and make sure that it's part of the design process.
At the end of the day, you can have all the technology you want, but if you can't engage people around it thoughtfully and plan through that with leaders, we talk about skills, culture and organisational structures. The big areas for us when we're talking with clients around this technology coming into workplaces. If you can't think about the human side of that, because the technology stuff's easy, as far as I'm concerned. I know there's some complexities behind it.
But far more complex is that human engagement side of this equation and that integration point. Because if you can't engage people thoughtfully, think about how you're engaging the different generations, have those inclusive design principles, and really think about if you're going for productivity gains, you may or may not get that from the technology. But what you will get is a big fat cost to your business if you let a whole bunch of knowledge go or you treat people on the way out horrendously so that the people that are staying look at that and go, I could be next. So why don't I jump ship early in advance because I'm not sitting around waiting for that. I'm going to take control and go and find something else. And that's had a massive cost to businesses. And connecting together those two points you were just making around the sensitivity, thoughtfulness and displacement.
So if workers are being displaced in one organisation, it is highly likely that their career path and role in all organisations is displaced too. So being a leader and having that sensitivity and thoughtfulness around the human in front of you who may not have another role to go to. So helping them think about.
Well, what could be the next progression in where their skills could transition over to something different if their role no longer exists, their industry career path no longer exists? Yeah, totally agree. And recalibrating the culture, like you were saying before around people will have more time and more space. And there is that inherent unspoken pressure to fill up your time when you're an employee.
The leaders need to be able to strategically think about where time will be freed up, not letting their employees feel the pressure to feel like they have to fill it up themselves, but actually have a really good deep conversation around where is the new value going to be added and what should they be doing in that time instead, which hasn't happened in the past. Whenever we've redesigned, re -engineered processes and freed up time.
The employee always feels the pressure to fill it up themselves with stuff. Yeah, I totally agree. We haven't been good at that. What a cool opportunity though if you could harness that for innovation and just creating better experiences in many different ways. I think that's a great opportunity. But thank you so much Cheryl for joining us today. It's been great to have your deep insights and perspective and know, ideas and provocations for the opportunities for leaders to think about this differently and the opportunity that's different this time to previous transformations in organisations. Yeah, and vice versa. Thanks for both of you creating the space to actually host this because I think it enables and gives an opportunity to hear from a whole lot of different voices around this space. Yes, it's intensive AI, but at the same time,
think you're creating a really digestible space for leaders. And I think that's fantastic. Well done, you too. you. Thanks for joining us.
