There's something amiss with the way that AI is marketed to knowledge workers. I'm hearing in the news all the time that "AI is going to take away job X or job Y" by the end of the year, or the month, or by Friday afternoon. And this fear is a deliberate strategy - it's meant to promote a product, namely, the AI SaaS products of major tech companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and many, many others.
Like all technology waves, there's an embedded assumption that generating some fear of missing out (FOMO) will help drive adoption. You don't want to be the last person on the boat, otherwise you'll miss the benefits of this coming era.
There's certainly some truth to that concept - adopting and learning about new technology is almost always useful context or knowedlge that can help us make deciisons. But the way this coming AI revolution is being marketed feels off. To show this, I'll use a classic change communication tool called the "Beckhard-Harris Change Formula"
Resistance < Status Quo Disapppointment x Vision for a Better Future x Ease of First Steps/Adoption
This formula argues that for a change to be successful, the resistance to that change must be less than the product of the following variables:
Status Quo Disappointment - how fed up people are with how their world operates today
Vision - How much they understand their lives will improve if they adopt the change
Ease of First Steps - How easy it is to start the process of adopting the change
What jumps out to me is that a lot of the messaging about using Gen AI at work relies on the assumption that the vision of "going to work" articulated out by these AI companies isn't really all that appealing. Many people I talk to (myself included) have a hard time visualizaing what will take up their time if they aren't working on all these time consuming (and automatable) tasks. If fixing spreadsheets has taken up 40% of my working hours for the last five years, then what will I do at work? It's an easy assumption to make that the most likely outcome is a layoff, rather than some new verion of a job that nobody has every experienced, articulated or trained on.
The vision is blurry, and compound that with the fact that these tools are constantly changing so it's hard to understand what work will be in the next year or so.
A better way to frame the vision is "what is the most impactful business challenge facing us right now? What do we need to solve it?"
This is a much better question to be asking ourselves right now. AI is just one of many tools that can be used to solve business problems. And the vision statement should be tied directly to a business outcome we're trying to achieve, not just the generic adoption of a new technology for the sake of avoiding FOMO.
How can we grow our customer base by 5%?
How can we increase NPS by 2 points next quarter?
How can I save 2 hours a week so I can get home earlier and make a real dinner (vs. ordering takeout for the 3rd time this week)?
AI might be a solution to those, but it might not! It could be a process improvement or cancelling a useless recurring meeting or simply picking up the phone and calling five customers to find out what's on their mind. Not everything is AI, its a tool in the toolbox to help us achieve our business (or career) goals.
Everyone deserves to have a vision for their own future career, and it's time we start making those visions clear, rather than simply saying "oh AI will do that"