Some of the information about the arrival of AI is frankly scary. Here’s an interesting take that’s more about what will be left for us to do.
It’s Bruce Daisley interviewing Alexia Cambon, Head of Research on Copilot & Future of Work at Microsoft.
Here are some of the interesting tidbits
- we are currently interrupted 275 times a day – every two minutes, so we rarely get concentrated time (unless we make that happen)
- Ten minutes before a meeting the powerpoint deck is edited 122% more than in the entire 3 hours before
- Much of the mush work (write this up, summarise the key points, schedule a meeting) will be done by AI agents, we will move from documents to dialogue – we’ll have more meetings, but that’s not where we get information or administer, it’s where we decide and create (i think of all of the stand ups I’ve been in that are just making sure people are up to speed on where things are up to!)
A lot of work will be humans + an “agent” – studies have shown human / agent teams more productive and creative than all human or all agent teams.
But here’s the good news for me (who specialises in helping people acquire the all-important soft skills), the soft skills will endure. The things that AI can’t do that humans can. Not empathy (some bots perform better empathy than some humans), but the face-to-face human connections
Storytelling, relationships, business transformation, strategy, all of those much more complex, less tangible aspects of the work experience will be more reserved for humans…
