By Jack Miller
Imagine this. You arrive at work early as usual, before your team comes in. But your new employee beat you to it, and in fact, never went home last night. Their greeting is the same as yesterday: “How can I help you today?” The crazy thing is that even though they’re relatively new to the company, they can already answer any question about any topic and complete in a nanosecond what it takes seasoned employees a week to manage.
Sounds like an employer’s dream, right? But wait—here’s the catch. The rest of the team are suspicious of the new hire and maybe even a little jealous. There’s escalating workplace tension, and it seems like the new worker doesn’t care. No emotion. No understanding of workplace dynamics. Congratulations—you’re the boss of a new AI-driven “digital worker,” as these tools are being called. And there are a lot more heading to your business very soon.
All of that’s a colorful way of saying the American workplace (and every other) is changing faster than most of us can comprehend or fully embrace. But like every great shift in the fabric of work, from the Industrial Revolution to the post-war boom, we have to get it right. Managers must find a way to manage effectively. Whether you’re a business unit lead in a vast corporation or a marketer running a lean team of multi-taskers, it’s time to consider what man plus machine can do for your business—and how you as the boss, most crucially, must steer this hybrid evolution of work. Here’s how I see it.
WHAT IS A DIGITAL WORKER?
The term digital worker emerged some time ago. But initially it had one meaning: those workers who had proficiency in digital skills. The times, plus advances in software and automation, have quickly rewritten the meaning, and today a digital worker is an AI-powered system, solution, or specific task within an organization. Those tasks can range from simple chatbots interacting with the public or vendors and suppliers to process orders to complex algorithms capable of analyzing vast datasets and making data-led decisions for the business.
A 2024 report by Microsoft and LinkedIn found that 75% of employees use AI at work, with almost half (46%) reporting the adoption of AI tools within the prior six months. Simpler forms of AI have been around for years, but when you consider that generative AI arrived only three years ago, in 2022, that’s a staggering pace and scale of integration. The reasons are self-explanatory when July 2023 research from the Nielsen Norman Group (“AI Improves Employee Productivity by 66%”) shows how an organization can increase throughput by about two-thirds with generative AI tools as part of the workforce mix. The question with all of this isn’t “Should we use AI to remain competitive?” but rather “How do we, as managers, best employ these tools within our workforce to drive our vision for the business?”
HUMANS CONTEXTUALIZE, MACHINES MEASURE
Let’s face it, work isn’t all about pushing buttons, tapping keys, and moving things off your desk. Looking at marketing as an example, most of the work requires a sophisticated understanding of consumers, the monitoring of changes in the marketplace, and an understanding of emerging conditions and trends.
Imagine an agency launching a new campaign for a luxury product around the holidays. The agency, putting too much faith in AI-driven consumer sentiment analysis tools, uses these tools to scan millions of social media posts and comments to generate insights for the launch. Based on its analysis, the AI recommends a humorous, lighthearted tone for the holiday ad, determining that humor has played well in the brand’s recent history. But here’s the problem—the AI failed to recognize a critical shift in consumer sentiment. Faltering economic conditions and layoffs have made the target audience averse to luxury products and extremely price sensitive. The campaign lands and the brand is immediately criticized as “tone deaf,” triggering a PR crisis and a loss of revenue from all sales.
While AI offers efficiencies in data analysis, it lacks the nuanced understanding, ethical judgment, and emotional intelligence that human workers bring to the task. It can’t contextualize events beyond data trends. So in this instance, while the digital worker saw increased discussion among the brand audience, it didn’t understand the emotional conditions consumers were facing. A September 2020 MIT Technology Review (“How Close Is AI to Decoding Our Emotions?”) cites studies that show AI tools can often misinterpret the complexity and meaning of human emotions. For instance, scowling is only associated with anger 30% of the time, according to the research, causing interpretative challenges for AI tools and systems.
In some industries, failure can be significant. AI tools have been used in the fragrance industry to develop perfume formulations at speed to reduce cost and increase production. But without a “nose” for the business, these tools cannot replicate the emotional depth and sensory insights the human perfumer brings to the bottle. In short, the common denominator with all AI tools is the crucial need for human oversight, with management leaders taking all AI outputs and making them part of a broader, integrated work product with humans at the center.
STRATEGIES TO BRING HUMAN AND DIGITAL WORKERS TOGETHER
The cat, as they say, is definitely out of the bag. And we can’t turn back the AI clock, nor should we. The business benefits of digital workers in your team are enormous, so long as you have the guardrails, operating procedures, and strategies in place to ensure successful integration. According to a May 2023 article by McKinsey (“AI-Powered Marketing and Sales Reach New Heights with Generative AI”), players that make investment in AI are seeing a revenue rise of 3 to 15% and ROI lift of 10 to 20%. If that sounds appealing, consider these strategies to better integrate human and digital workers:
Define clear roles for people and AI processes. Our role as managers is clear: Set the strategy and oversee execution. That means establishing a clear delineation between tasks more suited to AI and those requiring human skills and intervention. Keep digital workers aligned around tasks such as data analysis, routine tasks, and administration, and free up human worker time for deeper thinking around strategy, creative development, and campaign decision making.
Implement robust robot oversight. Like people, AI doesn’t get everything right all the time, but managing digital workers is different from conducting a performance review and initiating staff development training. Meet with your technology leads to develop protocols that can measure and monitor all AI outputs. Regular audits won’t make you a friend of your human workers, but they’re essential to ensure that AI tools work within ethical parameters and operational guidelines. The oversight also helps prevent, or identify, errors and biases that AI workers can inadvertently and frequently introduce into processes.
Foster a culture of continuous learning. Don’t flip the switch on AI tools and let your human workers conduct business as usual. The goal is integration between digital and human workers. Give employees the knowledge, encouragement, and training to stay up to date on how AI tools work, what role they play in the business, and how to achieve the best results. Training programs can help employees effectively collaborate with AI tools, but also ensure they leverage technology without becoming overly reliant on it.
Prioritize ethical considerations. It’s important to ensure that AI tools adhere to ethical standards but also fit with both industry standards and the values you have for your business and employees. Refer to frameworks such as the EU AI act or OECD AI principles to help ensure the way AI solutions are integrated into operations and the outputs they produce reflect fairness, non-discrimination, and responsible data usage. In other words, the same expectations you set for human workers.
Implement oversight and explainability. With any member of your workforce, there must be oversight. A manager or supervisor should assist with daily performance and quality, so consider the creation of AI ethics officers in your business to monitor operations and outcomes as your workplace undergoes change. This could, and likely should, include human-in-the-loop (HITL) processes—humans involved in AI output analysis when they affect employees or consumers. Think about a clear chain of accountability as well—who in the company is responsible if, or when, AI solutions go wrong? Additionally, use explainable AI (XAI) models, which enable decisions to be more easily audited and communicated to employees and others affected.
Monitor AI performance but also encourage human attentiveness. With fast and enormous advances in technology, it’s tempting to think that these advanced AI tools are always correct, but you need to encourage employees to use critical thinking and assist them with the process. It’s not about blind AI trust, but rather the thoughtful use of a tool that, just like a chisel on wood, requires careful and skillful application. With constant monitoring and assessment, it’s far easier to adjust AI and models based on real-world impact versus the theoretical things you set out to do with it.
THE LAST WORD
We’re not in a 1960s sci-fi movie where the machines or malignant technology takes over our world. Despite AI’s ability to produce results at speed and scale, which is incredibly powerful to any marketer or other business, it can’t deliver with the sensitivity and sophistication of real human workers.
Helping digital workers integrate appropriately in the workplace is going to take focus and time, just as with human workers. That means setting clear goals for what AI does and how it does it while measuring performance. Every business is going to need human oversight to help these new tools become better at understanding what’s expected of everyone in the workplace. You can’t just show up, think you know it all, and do work your way, ignoring the ideas, instructions, and demands of the boss.
Jack Miller is the founder and CEO of True Independent Holdings, one of the leading media strategy and communications groups in North America.