Executive Summary

As with the adoption of all technology, user experience trumps technical refinements. Many organizations implementing AI initiatives are making a mistake by focusing on smarter algorithms over compelling use cases. Use cases where peoples jobs become simpler and more productive are essential to AI workplace adoption. Focusing on clearer, crisper use cases means better and more productive relationships between machines and humans. This article offers five use case categories assistant, guide, consultant, colleague, boss that emerge when companies use AI-empowered people and processes over autonomous systems. Each describes how intelligent entities work together to get the job done and how depending on the process, AI makes the human element matter even more.

As artificial intelligence algorithms infiltrate the enterprise, organizational learning matters as much as machine learning. How should smart management teams maximize the economic value of smarter systems?

Business process redesign and better training are important, but better use cases those real-world tasks and interactions that determine everyday business outcomes offer the biggest payoffs. Privileging smarter algorithms over thoughtful use cases is the most pernicious mistake I see in current enterprise AI initiatives. Somethings wrong when optimizing process technologies take precedence over how work actually gets done.

Unless were actually automating a process that is, taking humans out of the loop AI algorithms should make peoples jobs simpler, easier, and more productive. Identifying use cases where AI adds as much value to peoples performance as to process efficiencies is essential to successful enterprise adoption. By contrast, companies committed to giving smart machines greater autonomy and control focus on governance and decision rights.

Strategically speaking, a brilliant data-driven algorithm typically matters less than thoughtful UX design. Thoughtful UX designs can better train machine learning systems to become even smarter. The most effective data scientists I know learn from use-case and UX-driven insights. At one industrial controls company, for example, the data scientists discovered that users of one of their smart systems informally used a dataset to help prioritize customer responses. That unexpected use case led to a retraining of the original algorithm.

Focusing on clearer, cleaner use cases means better and more productive relationships between AI and its humans. The division of labor becomes a source of design inspiration and exploration. The quest for better outcomes shifts from training smarter algorithms to figuring out howtheuse case should evolve. That drives machine learning and organizational learning alike.

Five dominant use case categories emerge when organizations pick AI-empowered people and processes over autonomous systems. Unsurprisingly, these categories describe how intelligent entities work together to get the job done and highlight that a personal touch still matters. Depending on the person, process, and desired outcome, AI can make the human element matter more.

Assistants

Alexa, Siri and Cortana already embody real-world use cases for AI-assistantship. In Amazons felicitous phrasing, assistants have skills enabling them to perform moderately complex tasks. Whether mediated by voice or chatbot, simple and straightforward interfaces make assistants fast and easy to use. Their effectiveness is predicated as much on people knowing exactly what they need as algorithmic sophistication. As digital assistants become smarter and more knowledgeable, their task range and repertoire expands. The most effective assistants learn to prompt their users with timely questions and key words to improve both interactions and outcomes.

Guide

Where assistants perform requested tasks, guides help users navigate task complexity to achieve desired outcomes. Using Waze to drive through cross-town traffic troubled by construction is one example; using an augmented-reality tool to diagnose and repair a mobile device or HVAC system would be another. Guides digitally show and tell their humans what their next steps should be and, should missteps occurs, suggest alternate paths to success. Guides are smart software sherpa whose domain expertise is dedicated to getting their users to desired destinations.

Consultant

In contrast to guides, consultants go well beyond navigation and destination expertise. AI consultants span use cases where workers need either just-in-time expertise or bespoke advice to solve problems. Consultants, like their human counterparts, offer options and explanations, as well as reasons and rationales. A software development project manager needs to evaluate scheduling trade-offs; AI consultants ask questions and elicit information allowing specific next step recommendations. AI consultants can include relevant links, project histories and reports for context. More sophisticated consultants offer strategic advice to complement their tactical recommendations.

Consultants customize their functional knowledge scheduling; budgeting; resource allocation; procurement; purchasing; graphic design; etc. to their human clients use case needs. They are robo-advisers dispassionately dispensing their domain expertise.

Colleague

A colleague is like a consultant but with a data-driven and analytic grasp of the local situation. That is, a colleagues domain expertise is the organization itself. Colleagues have access to the relevant workplace analytics, enterprise budgets, schedules, plans, priorities and presentations to offer organizational advice to colleagues. Colleague use cases revolve around advice managers and workers need to work more efficiently and effectively in the enterprise. An AI colleague might recommend referencing and/or attaching a presentation in an email; which project leaders to ask for advice; what budget template is appropriate for a requisition; what client contacts need an early warning, etc. Colleagues are more collaborator than tool; they offer data-driven organizational insight and awareness. Like their human counterparts, they serve as sounding boards that who? help clarify communications, aspirations and risk.

Boss

Where colleagues and consultants advise, bosses direct. Boss AI tells its humans what to do next. Boss use cases eliminate options, choices and ambiguity in favor of dictates, decrees and directives to be obeyed. Start doing this; stop doing that; change this schedule; shrink that budget; send this memo to your team.

Boss AI is designed for obedience and compliance; the human in the loop must yield to the algorithm in the system. Boss AI represents the slippery slope to autonomy the workplace counterpart to an autopilot taking over an airplane cockpit or an automotive collision avoidance system slamming on the brakes. Specific use cases and circumstances trigger human subordination to software. But bosswares true test is human: if humans arent sanctioned or fired for disobedience, then the software really isnt a boss.

As the last example illustrates, these distinct categories can swiftly blur into each other. Its easy to conceive of scenarios and use cases where guides can become assistants, assistants situationally escalate into colleagues, and consultants transform into bosses. But the fundamental differences and distinctions these five categories present should inject real rigor and discipline intoimagining their futures.

Trust is implicit in all five categories. Do workers trust their assistants to do what theyve been told or guides to get them where they want to go? Do managers trust the competence of bossware or that their colleagues wont betray them? Trust and transparency issues persist regardless of how smart AI software becomes, and they become even more important as the reasons for decisions become overwhelmingly complex and sophisticated. One risk: these artificial intelligences evolve or devolve into frenemies. That is, software that is simultaneously friend and rival to its human complement. Consequently, use cases become essential to identifying what kinds of interfaces and interactions facilitate human/machine trust.

Use cases may prove vital to empowering smart human/smart machine productivity. But reality suggests their ultimate value may come from how thoughtfully they accelerate the organizations advance to greater automation and autonomy. The true organizational impact and influence these categories may be that they prove to be the best way for humans to train their successors.

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AI Won't Change Companies Without Great UX - Harvard Business Review