The Boston Consulting Group recently picked up a surprising counter-intuitive result in one of its recent studies. There has been no increased adoption of AI among frontline workers in recent years.
This stagnating trend “surprised us,” David Martin, managing director and senior partner at Boston Consulting Group, recently disclosed on Michael Krigsman’s CXOTalk. The reasons for this slowdown in adoption include a lack of explanation of the objectives of AI efforts, along with resistance due to fears of job losses.
But digging deeper, “frontline employees have less use for AI than leaders do,” he continued. “You’re looking at retail store employees and field technicians who are more and more using it. But there’s a lot of on-the-ground labor that takes place where AI is not going to be an important piece of technology for the employee to use in their day-to-day lives.”
Looking up the corporate ladder, executives or leaders also are worried about their own jobs, and likely resisting AI. “There is a lot of increased uncertainty, both at the individual level, ‘What’s gonna happen to my role in the organization?’ As well as at the leadership level, ‘How do I craft a strategy around this dynamic market? Is my business disrupted?’”
For too many organizations, AI is being deployed to pave over existing processes, versus than being used more imaginatively. “A lot of companies right now are challenging with near-term issues and cost pressure and inflation and geopolitical,” Martin pointed out. “A lot of the uses of AI and the initiatives that companies are pushing on are too incremental. It is how to use AI to further automate tasks, or specific parts of a workflow. And they’re losing an opportunity to actually rethink the workflow end-to-end.”
Incremental thinking leads to an incremental vision, he added.
A big part of a more holistic approach to AI is the redesign of jobs that includes coworking between humans and AI agents. ‘You’re gonna see a lot of roles working side by side with agents in a collaborative way or augmented way, or roles that are having to manage agents,” said Martin. “It’s a completely different muscle to build.”
Prepare for more creativity in workers’ and executives’ roles as a result of AI, he predicted. “Creativity will be introduced as part of many jobs that currently don’t demand it. Critical thinking because of hallucinations. Competencies that will be magnified in their importance.”
With agents in the mix, frontline employees will be acting as their managers, Martin predicted. “A lot of how frontline employees’ interactions with agents will take place is very much like a manager and a frontline employee – it is collaborative, it’s coaching, it’s training.”
