There’s a common line doing the rounds:
“AI won’t take your job. Someone using AI will.”
And while that’s probably true, I think it actually misses a much wider point. One that’s less about technology and much more about people, culture, and behaviours.
Most of us approach work (and life) in one of two ways. Some people are solutions-orientated, and some people are process-orientated.
For years, a lot of corporate cultures have encouraged process-orientated behaviour. It’s safer. People feel like, “I don’t have the authority to challenge how things are done here, but if I follow the process, no one can blame me.” And fair enough! That’s how many organisations have been designed to work. That’s the culture they’ve developed by rewarding those behaviours until it’s become the unconscious and unsaid way in which people are expected to behave.
But there is another way of operating. Outcomes-orientated people don’t worry too much about the process. If the process doesn’t deliver the outcome, they feel internally empowered to change it, fix it, or work around it. And ideally those people find themselves in an organisation that welcomes that kind of constructive challenge. Organisations that empower their people to take ownership and focus on outcomes.
And this is where AI makes that cultural divide much sharper.
So much of AI (or as I prefer to describe it ‘applied computer science’) is going to automate or accelerate processes. If your approach to work is simply to follow process, you’re at real risk of the processes you follow becoming commodified. And commodified processes are perfect to be replaced by automation and computer models.
If you’re focused on the outcome you’re trying to achieve, then computer models become tools that help you deliver outcomes more quickly, more efficiently, and more creatively. You’re the person using AI to deliver something better not the person being replaced by it.
Organisations need to pay attention to this. This is existential for companies who operate in a competitive market.
The companies that empower their people to focus on outcomes, challenge broken processes, and improve how things get done will adapt fastest to the new technology environment. They’ll use AI to become significantly more effective and efficient. They’ll be exciting places to work. The future, Today!
The organisations that cling to disempowering, process-first cultures won’t just fall behind, they’ll become commodified and will be replaced by AI.
The truth is simple: People who are empowered to deliver outcomes will thrive in an AI world. People who retreat into process are the ones in danger.
The robots aren’t coming for everyone, just for the jobs where humans weren’t really allowed to think in the first place.