Editorial
The Gist
- AI imperative. Establishing an "AI philosophy" is crucial for organizations to navigate the complexities and benefits of AI in business.
- Nuanced view. The "Frenemy" approach offers a balanced, realistic outlook on AI, acknowledging both its advantages and limitations.
- Partnership potential. Viewing AI as a partner can foster a long-term, productive relationship, maximizing benefits for both business and customers.
With all the hype around AI in business these days, it may feel like there is no time to step back and consider some of the deeper implications of its adoption. After all, who wants to be the last to get on the bandwagon, particularly when AI, unlike some other recent much-hyped areas (I’m looking at you, metaverse and NFTs) adopting artificial intelligence-based tools and platforms can offer some immediate benefits to organizations.
That said, I want to make the argument that your organization needs an “AI philosophy,” and quickly. It is likely already too late to pause adoption by your teams, but you can still establish an enterprise-wide stance on the adoption of AI in business and best practices. This will enable you to operationalize AI more easily, and to more clearly articulate your AI vision to your employees, partners and your customers.
To help you create an AI philosophy, I’m going to walk through a few scenarios, and then we’ll end with a recommendation. So to start, let’s talk through three overall approaches and the pros and cons of each.
AI in Business: Friend/Foe
The first scenario of our exploration of AI in business philosophies is perhaps the most extreme. I call this Friend or Foe. There are two potential cases here:
- Executives and leaders love AI because they believe it will cut costs, jobs and overhead in general, and employees hate it because they fear for their jobs.
- Employees love AI because it saves them time and helps them avoid the drudgery of their work, and executives and leaders hate it because they are concerned about risks, employees that aren’t fully utilized and the nagging feeling that they are losing human productivity and quality.
For many, this might sound familiar, as artificial intelligence seems to be a polarizing topic, with viewpoints varying greatly, and depending on who within an organization you are talking to, and their role.
Let’s look at the pros and cons of this friend or foe approach.
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The Pros: Are There Any?
In full transparency, there aren’t too many pros here. We’ve essentially got leaders and managers against employees, which is never a good setup, but let’s talk through a few here as these points will become more relevant as we explore the frenemy and partner relationships.
The pro of considering AI a friend, however, is that there is an openness to using it and a willingness to look past some obstacles and look on the bright side of adoption. There is also a willingness to try a few tools and platforms to see which is best.
The pro of considering AI a foe is a more cautious approach in an as-yet unregulated environment with a lot of gray areas. That said, I think foe is a pretty extreme term here, which is why the next scenario looks at AI as a frenemy instead. However, there are some big, ethical issues that need to be looked at, and some industries can have much bigger negative repercussions for not taking into account bias, copyright infringement or other issues.
That said, if roughly half of the organization considers AI either a friend or foe, it is hard to have a productive dialogue about some of the pros of either way of thinking, so organizations that find themselves in a friend or foe situation may not be able to fully benefit from the pros here.
The Cons: Mistrust Within Companies
Similarly, the cons of this friend or foe approach is that no one really wins in this scenario. There is distrust on one side or the other, depending on who treats AI as “friend,” and instead of real dialogue about the benefits and drawbacks, there are sides in a battle.
Overall, the friend or foe approach is much too binary to work in the real world. Organizations taking this view are not likely to succeed in the long run and will quickly (if they haven’t already) run into some serious issues and internal disconnects, and these will likely spill over into their customer communications and interactions soon enough.
Best case, these companies will miss out on opportunities to innovate and embrace some of the wide-reaching benefits of AI-based tools, methods and platforms, and they might overlook some of the risks and dangers because there are factions in place of a realistic and productive dialogue.
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AI in Business: Frenemy
This brings us to the next type of AI philosophy: the frenemy. This is where the enterprise is cautiously optimistic, and, depending on the specifics, AI can either be friend or enemy and often a little of each even within the same teams, roles and areas of the business. Though this may seem like a paradox, in some ways this is the most realistic philosophy because it acknowledges there are both upsides and downsides.
As I mentioned in the previous section on friend or foe, there are real opportunities, but also real potential conflicts and issues that enterprises within all types of industries need to consider. Thus, this parallel approach can make sense. Let’s explore some of the pros and cons here.
The Pros: Nuanced Relationship to AI
The frenemy approach allows organizations to have a more nuanced relationship to AI. In some ways it may be beneficial to different teams and roles within the organization, yet in others it may require more caution and even a pause before implementing anything.
While it may seem contradictory, treating AI as a frenemy can help organizations take small steps toward greater AI adoption without blindly opening the floodgates and reaping whatever that may bring.
The Cons: Skepticism Abounds?
Those pros aside, using a term like “frenemy” implies some skepticism and an assumption that there are pure negatives to deeper AI adoption, rather than areas which simply need some governance and guardrails.
Thus, the cons of a frenemy philosophy are that there may not be an openness to experimentation and innovation in some key areas, and those blind spots may hinder bigger growth in areas that competitors could exploit as a weakness.
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AI in Business: Partnership Philosophy
Finally, we get to the most symbiotic of the three relationships between businesses and AI: the partnership philosophy. At its essence the partner philosophy of AI adoption means being realistic about the potential risk areas while working with AI to innovate and find what works and what doesn’t.
When we think of a good partner, it also implies several things:
- Good partners have a transparent relationship, and there is open communication between them.
- Good partners take the good with the bad and are able to make compromises that still reap benefits.
- Good partners are able to give and take without sacrificing the relationship, and while striving for a win-win.
- Good partners understand what each is great at, and are able to adapt the way they work to maximize benefits and outcomes accordingly.
Let’s look at some of the pros and cons of a partnership approach.
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The Pros: Productive Long-Term Relationships, Customer Benefits
The biggest benefit of the partner philosophy is that, from my perspective, it sets up the enterprise for the most productive long-term relationship to AI and both the benefits and cautions that it brings. In a partnership philosophy, there are no assumptions of good or bad, but more simply an understanding that every benefit must be balanced with the risks and uncertainties.
As AI assistants, applications and other platforms become more conversational and require less technical knowledge to operate, a partner philosophy also “humanizes” the relationship between software and the people that use it. While this has benefits for the teams using it by democratizing access to features and functionality previously hidden behind layers of coding and well-formatted requests, it also has benefits for your customers.
After all, instead of software being a blunt tool to be used in the service of providing something to customers, with AI as a partner there is a sense that teams and artificial intelligence can work together toward a common goal of providing a great customer experience, each learning from the other continually over time.
The Cons: Rosy Glasses for AI
While there are a lot of pros here, the caution in this approach is to look at the relationship between AI and the enterprise with a little too rosy a view. After all, as much as we might want to consider AI part of the team, it’s zeroes and ones, not actual people!
While the partnership philosophy might be a little more idealistic than the frenemy approach, and definitely more so than the friend or foe approach can be, exploring a relationship with AI that looks at it as a partner that augments and enables your human teams to do more, extend their reach, and understand and serve customers better can be a win-win scenario for the business and your customers.
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Final Thoughts on Adopting AI in Business
As you can see, there is more than one approach you and your organization can take in setting the foundation for a relationship with AI and AI-based tools and platforms. While I don’t recommend the friend or foe or frenemy approaches, per se, there are aspects of each that you should take into account so as not to get blinded by the shiny object of the moment that is artificial intelligence.
That said, looking at AI in business as a partner for your organization is an area I would highly recommend you explore further. There are plenty of reasons to be cautious about AI adoption, but there are just as many (if not more) reasons to be optimistic about the benefits it can bring to your business, your employees and to your customers.
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