People Don’t Hate Change… They Hate Your Version Of It

AI could well be the worst marketed product/tech rollout in the history of humanity.

What makes this confusing for me to write is that I’m more optimistic about its potential than any other technology that have come before it. What we have here is a general-purpose technology that could fundamentally change how we work… learn… create… communicate and solve problems. Scientific advancements we can’t even imagine… progress on some of our long-standing unsolvable issues… it’s a lot to think on.

But look at how it’s being introduced to us…

AI could eliminate your job… make your skills obsolete… undermine your ability to think critically… disrupt education… destroy creative industries… remove the need for entry-level employees… and potentially become smarter than humanity itself (oh… yeah… and that whole extinction level crisis stuff). Then, almost in the same breath, the industry tells us that we need to embrace it immediately or risk being left behind (both individually and as a country).

How’s that supposed to make anyone feel optimistic?

I understand why the people building frontier models are sounding the alarms. They’re dealing with something that has enormous implications for our society… and they have real responsibilities around safety and the liability of what they’re creating (more on that here: AI Already Knows The Rules. So Why Does It Break Them?). And because it’s coming straight from the horse’s mouth, these don’t feel like conspiracy concerns. But somewhere along the way, the conversation became mostly about what AI might take away… with much less attention to helping people imagine what it could solve for.

The risks are tangible and the opportunities are mostly abstract.

Long before AI, we spent a lot of time dealing with teams and their resistance to change… overcoming resistance… accepting new paradigms of operation. It all got me wondering… what if people aren’t resistant to change at all? What if they’re resistant to the particular future we’re asking them to accept? In this week’s episode of Thinking With Mitch Joel, Julia Dhar (founder of the Behavioral Science Lab at Boston Consulting Group and co-author of How Change Really Works) discussed three conditions that make positive change possible: optimism about the future, reasonably clear expectations and a sense of agency. Makes sense… people need to believe something can get better… understand what’s expected of them… and feel that their choices and actions can make a difference.

Now think about that in relation to how we’re talking about AI.

It seems like we’re struggling to provide any of those three conditions. The future is uncertain… the expectations are constantly changing because of how much “new” keeps landing… and, for many, the decisions about how AI will affect their work (and lives) are being made without/for them. Now that I think about it… they aren’t being invited to help shape the future… they’re being told to prepare for it.

There’s this weird feeling of powerlessness about what comes next…

I’m optimistic about AI because I’m optimistic about people. What matters is what we choose to do with technology. What happens if we can remove some of the redundancy and administrative friction from our working lives? What happens when people spend less time trapped inside their inboxes and much more time engaging in their domain of expertise? What happens if we are all abacus workers in a calculator world? My hope? More time thinking… collaborating… experimenting… inventing… doing the meaningful work that makes us feel more human… not less (and, yes, this includes using some of this super tech to improve ourselves).

I’m not entirely Pollyannaish about this (I learned some hard lessons throughout the past several digital transformations).

There will be disruption… difficult decisions. Pretending otherwise would be irresponsible. But allowing the most frightening possibilities to dominate the conversation is also a choice… and I think it’s a poor one. Business leaders have an immediate responsibility. They can’t simply announce an AI strategy… mandate adoption and expect enthusiasm. They have to help people understand what a better future looks like for them… what’s expected of them… and give them the agency to create it. That’s the part of change we keep forgetting.

We’ve spent so much time explaining how powerful the machines might become that we’ve barely begun to imagine how much more capable humanity could become because of this ingenuity.

If your organization is having conversations like this, book me for a keynote or conversation about change, innovation, and how to decode the future. I’ll be exploring these ideas over the next few days with SAP in Montreal, the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference in Cleveland, then with Food, Health & Consumer Products in Niagra-On-The-Lake, and a large law firm in Lake Louise… looking forward to the conversation.