The human focus of digitalisation

It seems like every day we hear about cool new online companies and how they work – with innovative businesses ranging from retail to logistics to space travel. Yes, digitalisation is a fantastic thing, and AI is a hotter topic than ever. But is it all good progress? Look more closely and we can see there are a lot of uncool aspects involved too.

Moving in the right direction?

Many of today's so-called ‘disruptive’ companies aren’t just disrupting in a good way. Their new approaches also break down sustainability, and interfere with worker-company relationships that have been built up over a century or so. After more than 40 years of progress in improving working situations for employees, now the world seems to be taking a different turn.

Autogenerated emails to fire an underperforming staff member, or to put constant pressure on productivity because of data analytics alone – this is more or less the reality today. AI is incredible, but we need to remember it lacks common sense. And sadly that lack of common sense is mirrored in some of the people behind the ‘new’ companies. Experience teaches us that a lot of performance can't be measured in concrete numbers: relationships, soft values and solution-oriented thinking.

What if you had a person who was 10% slower according to the data, but was great at creating relationships? Might their ability to nurture new business opportunities in fact make them more valuable than their official results suggest? How is this accounted for in the analytical models? Using AI is rather a blunt tool when it comes to decision-making processes.

With older assessment methods, a manager could at least say, "I’ve seen you are doing an excellent job; it just doesn't fit the criteria of the KPIs, and I can't do anything about it". In that scenario, at least the person takes some credit for their work – even if he doesn’t qualify for his bonus.

As more and more artificial intelligence is entering into the world, more and more emotional intelligence must enter into leadership.
- Amit Ray, Author of Compassionate Artificial Intelligence-

I once met a person who was so aware of the importance of building relationships that he flew to Canada from Europe every year for seven years – pretty much just to meet people for coffee and keep the conversation going. Every time he came home without any tangible achievements, but his gut feeling said he should keep going. Eventually he managed to make the company’s largest-ever deal – one worth several times more than most quickly-made deals.

Improve, don’t replace

The reality is that combining evidence-based decisions with those based on feelings is most likely the way to go. Therefore, we need a diversity of people combined with the technical tools to support them when needed.

So what’s my take-away from all this? Significant investments are going into technologies that promote ‘human-less’ approaches, instead of those that would make humans better. I find this very scary. Technology is excellent – I am a massive fan of digitalisation. However, it needs to be fair, and have a truly sustainable impact both on the environment and the humans using it.

Next time you are investing in digitalisation, I encourage you to focus on tools that will make both the company and its human operations safe and sustainable in the long term (such as those that reduce meetings or overheads). Such a focus will eventually result in improved financial performance.

I am proud that the company I am a part of is involved in meaningful projects like the mayday detection support for the Swedish maritime administration, which aims to help humans rather than replace them. It’s great to work with companies like TenFifty that have a common-sense approach to applying AI. I really hope that it will be possible to start including contract clauses stating that our tools may only be used to support humans, not to blame or replace them.

Do you really want to have beer or coffee with a computer in the future? I certainly don’t – and that’s why we need to keep a focus on humans. Because don’t forget, next time it might be you that’s faced with an automatic termination letter.

Mattias Larsson
Dedicated to digitalisation that makes people better