Nathan Labenz: belief

Transcript context

…Yes, and I think it's so early. And also there's not going to be a right answer for every organization. A lot of it depends on the psychological safety within the organization. I've long followed Amy Edmondson's great work and I think psychological safety has never been more important in our organization because ideally you have the people raising their hands and saying, this is bot **** or I contributed to bot **** and here is why. I think AI detectors, you know, there is for sure, and I'm seeing it from multiple different angles, you know, there will be a world where all of our AI tools will flag the level of uncertainty associated with the response as well as the likelihood of purely AI generation versus human to AI. I think what's exciting about the more context you have as well is you can feed it more data points. You can feed it not just generically is this likely to be generated by AI. If it knows enough about you as an individual, it can know, okay, Rebecca's default writing style as a human is this versus doing something generic. And I think I think that's why we're seeing a lot of detectors not work. Why I think this isn't necessarily and certainly isn't strictly a technology issue or solution is organizations need to understand the why. The why behind the bot ******** is just as important as the bot ********. In particular, when we think about using shadow AI tools, right? That is a form of bot ********. You're injecting risk into the organization by using an unapproved tool or a sanction in an unapproved way, we're seeing a cohort of organizations crack down and punish employees for doing that. And then we're seeing a portion that definitely have guardrails and repercussions for unsanctioned use of the technology, but not strictly that. It's understanding why are employees using unapproved tools or why are they coloring outside the lines because usually it's the highest performers that are doing that. And usually they're doing that because the existing tech stack isn't working for them. They see so much potential in the technology and they're making that calculus in their head. Hey, I would rather get the productivity gains. In the best cases, hopefully get the gains for the organization. And they're doing this trade off. Ideally, organizations recognize that and make the safe path, the more efficient path. That is the gold standard. I think part of it is a technology piece, but part of it is deeply human. Another stat that jumped out at me was, I believe both the people that do the most bot sitting. So doing, first thing that should be said is doing more bot sitting is associated with being more successful with AI. So both probably because You need to do it to get good results and because you are going to naturally do more of it the more you use AI in the simplest analysis. But then also the more bot sitting seems to be associated with higher likelihood of being on the job market and actively looking for your next phase of your career. And the same is also true on the bot ******** side. People that are doing more of that are again more likely to be looking for a job. That sounds scary and it might be scary. I guess another way I might interpret it if I think about the person who was in the traditional sort of customer service or customer success role and is now being asked to babysit bots, is maybe some of this turnover could in fact be healthy. If people are like doing something they don't want to do, I guess a big question in general with AI is like, Obviously, is it going to create more jobs than it destroys? But even more locally and focused on specific organizations and teams and individuals, is the new job that gets created, whether it's greater or less than one per job that gets eliminated, is it something that the person that had the original job can pivot into or would want to pivot into? And I guess my read on some of this stuff is like, it sort of suggests that in a lot of cases, the answer is no. People that are doing a lot of this AI stuff, good and bad, it sounds like are kind of voting with their feet that this is not really what they want. Maybe they don't see themselves being successful in this new world. And so I guess I wonder, do you see that as a sign, do you see that as something that like leadership is doing wrong? Or do you see it as sort of an actual signal of just change is often not what people want. And so they're kind of reacting in a ultimately what might be a perfectly sensible way. So I'll hypothesize here based on the data, because we certainly don't know causation. These are correlations more than anything else. I think when we think about bot sitting, it's very different than bot ********. Bot sitting, what we're seeing in the data, what I'm certainly seeing in practice is there are two big links between the act of bot sitting and the desire to leave the organization. One is, and we have an amazing co-author on the report, Paul Leonardi, who's done foundational, impactful work on what he calls digital exhaustion. The digital employee experience is increasingly the employee experience. We often trivialize it, but the reality is overwhelmingly we're seeing If employees are exhausted by technology, they're wanting to leave the organization. And when we think about bot sitting in particular, what I'm seeing is if employees are spending all of this time manually feeding context to the AI, that doesn't instill a whole bunch of confidence in the employee that their employer, the organization has a strategy or a good one around the technology. And I think that's a big part of it. If you're wasting your days bot sitting when your organization is vocalizing in all hands in town halls that this is a transformative technology and we're transforming. There's a disconnect that if you're seeing all else being equal in other organization that is investing in technologies that do have context, you're going to choose the latter. So I think that's the bot sitting piece. Certainly not the whole piece, but I think that those are reasonable conclusions to hypothesize. The bot ******** I think is different. The bot ******** is, in my opinion and what I'm seeing in conversations, you've decided that you're disengaged from the organization, perhaps because you're spending so much time bot sitting and you're wanting to leave the organization is a reflection of that broader disengagement, right? If you're bot sitting and no longer feeling a sense of ownership over your AI generated work, probably that's part of a bigger disengagement picture and feeling and sentiment within the organization. I certainly don't think that's the case for every employee, but I do think that's a part of it as well. Aruna, who I mentioned before, she hypothesizes in the report that perhaps it's also that people have bot sitted so or they become such an expert in the technology that they've realized their market value is higher outside the organization than inside of the organization. And that's a reflection of the disengagement, both in terms of bot ******** and the desire to leave the organization, your market value has increased. I certainly think that's for a subset of employees, the association as well.…

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