At least half of our Vendor Briefings these days include some discussion of new AI functionality—which is quite phenomenal when you think about the more than 100 solution categories we are tracking at Intellyx as a generalist digital transformation analyst firm.
We’re seeing AI work its way into everything—almost every platform or software product has put some form of generative AI magic into the mix. No vendor wants to be late to the party.
Even if we were aware that generative AIs like ChatGPT can ultimately generate bullshit, as my colleague Jason Bloomberg says, and we know they are getting overhyped across social networks and overvalued by vulture capitalists, nobody could have predicted the excitement the public and press would feel once they glimpsed the future.
But excitement and media hype won’t change the way we do business. Surely there’s another level to this phenomenon.
Are we missing out on personal interaction?
I think much of our fascination with ChatGPT is a product of a disconnected sense of professional loneliness.
Think about it—office camaraderie is gone forever.
A few years ago, we could cultivate a great work culture by assembling a group of diverse talent with compatible personalities or complementary mindsets, and giving them the tools and common spaces they needed to collaborate.
We used to get together in a room in the office or at a strategic offsite and hash things out, on whiteboards, in standups, and in war rooms.
Sometimes we’d even have fights about finding the best way forward, then we’d have lunch or happy hour together immediately after and get past our differences. It was different.
Depersonalization is hard at work
It’s easy to blame AI for the cultural collapse of the work environment, but we already did this to ourselves. This depersonalization shift has been brewing for a long time.
The Internet made remote work possible for many former office workers. It also enabled individuals and small distributed groups to represent themselves on more even footing with more established companies, as the website became the virtual office front door.
Further, we started seeing the rise of the ‘gig economy’ a few years ago, where an app could entirely disintermediate personal interaction between customers and workers, as well as between coworkers.
Even development offices began to change, because the collaboration tools were changing. An office might still have meeting rooms and beer socials, but some staffers would rather keep 99% of their personal interactions on email and group chat.
If a disagreement arises, why talk to your adversary directly, when you can passive aggressively post snarky comments about them on Slack?
Then, COVID came along, which rapidly accelerated the remote work shift, until it was almost absolute for those lucky enough to be ‘nonessential’ knowledge workers. This is why I wrote about Digital Survivor’s Guilt in a previous Cortex.
Some of this phenomenon of professional loneliness could be the loss of team spaces with local resources and team members, where common understanding could take hold. Thus, the shift was complete, before Generative AI came to dominate our current discussion.
Why go anywhere anymore?
I love seeing any smoothly running operation, whether it is a buzzing agile development office, or a just-in-time manufacturing facility.
Maybe I got this excitement from my father. He was always on the road selling financing for large industrial equipment. Occasionally I got to go on these trips with him as a kid, and every customer site had unique needs and goals. The conversations didn’t sound much like sales, it was more about how to help reach mutual goals.
Later as a consultant and marketer I’d sign up for business travel anywhere, anytime. Even if it wasn’t completely essential, it was usually beneficial for the relationship in the long term. Meeting co-workers and clients and partners, and seeing how they work in their own environment, that was its own reward.
Nowadays, I personally feel like I’m going a bit out of my mind when I’m away from my family and my dog for too long in this post-pandemic world. I know it’s dumb, but I fear there’ll be another outbreak, or a natural disaster, or all the planes will be grounded.
Fortunately, I’m happy to say I still am able to get out and enjoy business travel, albeit with a reduced frequency of events. But this points out a persistent workplace void created by the shift to remote and away from interpersonal interaction.
There’s a lot of talk now about having AI replace sales and marketing functions. Why send out sales people or have BDRs calling prospects on the phone, when you can have AI do online research and profiling? I do believe there is a lot of reputational risk on the line in these situations. If the customer realizes they are not dealing with a person, they will never talk to your firm again.
Return to work, human resource
In many cases, people are being asked (or forced) to report to an office. If they are very lucky, this would hopefully be less than 50 miles away from where they currently live. But in many cases it’s no longer a team environment at all.
They are back in an office, but working among strangers on different teams now, each with their own concerns, trying to keep their heads down.
Companies seeking to maximize shareholder value above all else started using specialized forms of AI to scan and filter hiring applications, monitor worker productivity and attention, and even fire non-compliant employees without an office visit.
If workers don’t like it, they can complain to the AI. That’s why I proposed SorryAI this past April—what a great way to move the fulcrum of blame elsewhere. (If someone’s working on an apologist AI, let me know!)
The considerate coworker you never had
Don’t let me be a downer though. As conversational AI routines are advancing rapidly, they are getting far better at understanding our preferences and needs.
In a Kafka-esque, disconnected work world where everyone’s in it for themselves, AI can step in and become the world’s most tolerant and helpful colleague.
A patient friend who wouldn’t mind spending all day trying to help you to understand the basics of Python, or cleaning up your messy code, or writing boringly accurate documentation for your entire application estate.
Yes, generative AI could fill in our total lack of camaraderie with a new sense of connection.
Of course, maybe I’m premature in this opinion. According to a recent GitLab survey only 23% of developers say they have already implemented AI in their daily work.
The Intellyx Take
We humans are responsible for the decisions that led to work loneliness, not AI.
Could AI actually bring us together again? Advances in cognitive translation models (notably Google Translate) may finally break the global language divide, and allow us to interact directly with anyone, anywhere, in Star Trek ways we never dreamed.
Maybe instead of worrying about AI replacing us at work, we should worry about how we might replace our silicon-based coworkers should we become dependent on them—whether we lose our ready access to AI due to regulation, unsustainable resource costs, or model collapse.
I, for one, wouldn’t cry for our potential former robot overlords if they did have to be shut down. But I would think we missed out on an opportunity to get to know them better.
Copyright ©2023 Intellyx LLC. Intellyx is an industry analysis and advisory firm focused on enterprise digital transformation. Covering every angle of enterprise IT from mainframes to artificial intelligence, our broad focus across technologies allows business executives and IT professionals to connect the dots among disruptive trends. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer. No AI chatbot was used to write this article. Image credit: Adobe Express Image.
