EditorialReduce Uncertainty to Drive AI Adoption

Artificial intelligence is nearing a tipping point in the workplace. 

Much like workplace digitization, senior organizational leaders report great interest in applying AI to drive efficiency, reduce costs and improve margins. 

But these aren’t their only aims in adopting AI.

In a recent Qualtrics study, two-thirds of executives said they also believe AI will have a positive impact on the employee experience — an important signal that many executives view AI as mutually beneficial to the organization’s operational and financial goals as well as for employees’ experiences at work. 

Yet only 39% of individual contributors agreed that AI in the workplace is “exciting” and nearly half of frontline employees said that AI is “scary.” Among the potential concerns, job security, work losing its “human element” and people losing their critical thinking skills were top of mind for participants in this study.

Employees Struggle With Uncertainty

From the perspectives of many employees, there is a lot of uncertainty around AI. Many employees are asking questions ranging from “am I going to have to change the way that I work?” to “is this technology going to replace me?” When organizational leaders communicate their excitement for AI by focusing on outcomes like efficiency and reduced costs, employees may wonder if these statements are just euphemisms for replacing humans with machines.  

AI is enabling significant change in organizations and successful organizational change is all about positively influencing peoples’ attitudes and behaviors. When employees face the prospect of significant, potentially difficult change — such as the changes AI can bring about — many employees will understandably experience negative emotions. But in the end, most of us are able to process those emotions and adapt. 

Humans are quite good at dealing with change when supported through it. What humans are not very good at dealing with is uncertainty. When faced with the unknown, humans tend to fill in the blanks and create stories in an attempt to make sense of the situation. This in turn causes higher levels of stress, anxiety and other negative emotions. 

Effective communication is central to reducing uncertainty among employees. But what should organizational leaders communicate when it comes to adopting AI? One clue rests in where regulations appear to be going.

Communicating and Implementing Principles of Ethical Usage

To the surprise of many, senior leaders of some of the most notable AI companies are calling for government intervention and regulation. In June 2023, the city of New York took a major step in regulating the use of AI for hiring and promotion decisions (NYC 144). These are likely signs of additional regulations to come, pointing toward principles that organizations should use in their adoption of AI and the accompanying communications.

There are two principles I believe will take center stage as more regulations are introduced, which should also help to alleviate concerns and uncertainties of employees: transparency and accountability. 

Transparency

When it comes to intelligent technologies, transparency translates to how easily humans can understand how the machine works and why it comes to the conclusions that it does. Like a car with the hood open, transparent models allow humans to see the inner workings of these technologies and understand the “how” and the “why.” An opaque model or algorithm (sometimes called a Black Box model), on the other hand, is more difficult for humans to understand and therefore trust. 

Opaque models often have very practical usage in organizations and for their purposes we might conclude that “they just work.” The challenge is that they are much more difficult to understand and explain. 

Ultimately, if humans cannot understand or explain how and why these models work, they will likely face more legal, social and ethical headwinds. Organizational leaders investing in the development or adoption of AI would be wise to prioritize transparency as a principle, especially for informing people- and job-impacting decisions. 

Accountability

In a now famous quote from 1979, IBM wrote “a computer can never be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision.” 

Human decision makers, however, can and should be held accountable. 

As organizations implement AI, the ultimate decisions should and will still be made by humans — and at many different levels of the organization. Much like early self-driving vehicles, the technology may “drive” the vehicle but the human driver is accountable for paying attention to the road and intervening when necessary. Beyond direct decision makers, organizational leaders that employ, train and equip those decision makers are also accountable for decisions based on AI assistance.

Balance the WIIFM for Organizations and Employees

When it comes to organizational change and uncertainty, a natural question everyone wants to know is “what’s in it for me?” And this is certainly the case for AI. 

There are practical steps to communicating during times of uncertainty including 1) acknowledging the uncertainty, 2) sharing what is already known or has been decided by leadership and 3) providing employees a path to more information. 

Within these communications, it is critical to anchor on principles that resonate with employees. For instance, while leaders may be excited about the increased organizational efficiency that may come from adopting large language models in contact centers and engineering teams, they must balance these organizationally-focused messages with the benefits to individual employees, such as automating routine work and freeing up their valuable time and resources. 

Just as transparency and accountability are likely to dominate regulatory conversations, being clear with employees that these principles will drive decisions company leadership makes about AI is crucial.  

Ultimately, AI can and will improve the working lives of people, and that is precisely the point. These goals must underpin the communications strategy and deployment of these intelligent technologies in order to drive adoption among employees.