Big Idea: Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy

How Digital Media Will Bring Out Our Best Selves in the Workplace

Tomorrow’s most effective individuals will combine their personal capabilities with customized digital boosters.

Michael Schrage Reading Time: 5 min 

Topics

Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy

The Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy initiative explores the growing use of artificial intelligence in the business landscape. The exploration looks specifically at how AI is affecting the development and execution of strategy in organizations.

In collaboration with

BCG
More in this series
Frontiers IDE Schrage Digital Better Self

Technology now touches and transforms every aspect of personal productivity in the workplace. Mobile devices, bots, and digital assistants are ubiquitous, while managers increasingly use key performance indicator (KPI) dashboards to monitor and measure employee performance. In industry after global industry, effectively collaborating with technology is as important as effectively collaborating with people.

Continually boosting the value of employees in this environment — especially knowledge workers — poses a difficult design challenge. Designing and training smarter algorithms may be cheaper and easier than retraining smart people. Advocates of autonomous systems and machine learning typically innovate to minimize or marginalize human involvement in business processes. For them, people are part of the problem, not the solution.

Organizations that take productivity seriously, however, understand that false dichotomies make poor investments: Smarter machines can — and should — be keys to unlocking greater returns from human capital.

My latest research suggests a novel and perhaps counterintuitive approach to the future of personal productivity. This approach, influenced more by behavioral economics insights than algorithmic innovation, challenges popular, data-driven digital paradigms.

The premise is that digital technology can drive greater self-awareness and self-assessment about how individuals create and contribute to enterprise value. The design focus shifts from digital assistants to digital assistance. Think of an AI that stands for “Augmented Introspection” as well as “Artificial Intelligence.”

The Workforce Driver: A Need for Higher-Performance Versions of Employees

As workforces confront more agile and adaptive global competition, traditional competencies and typical or ordinary personal performance growth may no longer suffice. That’s one reason digital innovators have focused on automating people out of processes or giving them “smarter tools” to better perform their tasks.

The rise of apps, bots, software agents, and digital assistants — such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana — has been remarkable. Acoustic agents and textual chatbots that respond to human requests are becoming integral to human effectiveness both at home and at work. Nevertheless, their increasing intelligence and ingenuity should not be allowed to define or dominate personal productivity debates. Yes, the prevailing agent/bot paradigm offers up smarter and better digital actors to do one’s bidding, but that bidding is done for the same old self.

Topics

Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy

The Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy initiative explores the growing use of artificial intelligence in the business landscape. The exploration looks specifically at how AI is affecting the development and execution of strategy in organizations.

In collaboration with

BCG
More in this series

About the Author

Michael Schrage is a research fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) and a visiting fellow at the Imperial College Department of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in London. He is the author of The Innovator’s Hypothesis: How Cheap Experiments Are Worth More Than Good Ideas (MIT Press, 2014). This article is based on his IDE research brief, “Multiplying Personal Productivity With Multiple Selves.”

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Comments (3)
Olivier Malafronte
When and where are you most engaged? What is more compelling than a private and purposeful conversation that engages your personal motivation? (A project you care about, a person you don’t understand, a vision that motivates you, a relationship you believe in, a conviction you hold etc.) It seems our inner space, our mental, emotional and physiological space is the first “place” we go to when considering any question or situation; if we want to create spaces that “work”, don’t we need to align first within our inner space before looking at what is happening outside? Before, or at least alongside what is happening in our city, society, work, office, lab, club, community, family etc.

Technology can help us create the space and time to facilitate our own engagement by leveraging a competence we all share: language. Language is a core capacity we develop and use to express thoughts, ideas, and problems, and it is also a whole complex system that we consciously and unconsciously use to motivate, empower and at times limit ourselves too. Today, the digital world we inhabit has us communicating constantly with our phones, computers, connected furniture and tools, and these, as well as many other devices have become our new workspaces. This means we carry our workspace with us all day and everywhere we go. These work spaces, living spaces and social spaces are expanded many times when connected on the internet. So, how do we align our inner-workspace with the outer-workspace? How can we use our communication capabilities to remain motivated and productive? And how do we make sure our communication devices don’t decrease our motivation and creativity?

Have you ever thought about a smart personal assistant that is trained to help you create the space and time for your thinking and activities, adapting to your emotional states, creativity, communication and your deepest aspirations? What if the first “workspace” we want to actively develop is our communication with ourselves and our conversations with others?
Nik Zafri Abdul Majid
Technology has made a lot of difference in our lives - no doubt about that. Since the days when Intranet started to make its way into corporations, the Knowledge Organization was born. 

Technology can also be misused as well. When we talk about productivity; to my perspective as "the ex boss"; 3 things come to my mind :

a. Employee using social media during office hours (somehow they manage to escape attention) which will affect productivity. 

This is not about using them on their work station (like those days) but it's about using them on mobile device and nobody can say anything about it. 

The mindset is "as long as my work is done, I can go on browsing on my mobile and I'm not using "company resources".

b. The most important part when planning of having KPI measuring productivity by use of ICT/Tools, rest on the "inventor" himself. Again, I am not talking about hiring ICT suppliers, consultants or sub-contractors but building the internal talents and developed by internal talents. 

The real issue here is "customization" (an "ancient" issue). ICT practitioners- be it CIO/CTO; like financial auditors; must first understand two things : 1) "What's in the CEO's mind? not their minds?" 2) Understand the nature of the industry that they are working with. (Teamwork is the answer, Simply ask if you don't understand)

c) there are still pending issues to have better security and confidentiality of the possibility that years of data collection can be hijacked by ex-employees. There must be some stronger policy on data security as mobile-device these days can do "wonders".
Tinko Stoyanov
All digital assistants, tools, and technologies listed in the article will have limited influence on human productivity without using a structured digital knowledge (hyper)space. The core human activities and productivity are based on knowledge. Unfortunately, the knowledge created by the humanity so far is dispersed on different kind of media thus is still not easily accessible.