AI has been labelled many things from a fundamental driver of change to just another technology.
People say AI kills jobs and creativity. That’s lazy thinking. The real risk is comfort—the reflex to cling to old silos and familiar workflows while the world moves on, and competitors build better systems.
Organisational silos evolved to manage scale.
AI has given us an alternative that is quicker, better, and cheaper, but requires a revision of the way we think about the tasks that face us. The silos of yesterday must be destroyed.
The biggest threat is resistance to change, a reluctance to embrace the huge productivity gains that AI has made possible. We become too comfortable to work at leveraging the available benefits of embracing the tech.
The leadership task is to leverage the capabilities of AI to become a catalyst for organisational and cultural change.
Rather than thinking about our jobs in functional silos we should be considering the potential to broaden our capacity to think and create new value at every point in the job process, leveraging the time freed up by AI to enhance the scope of the job itself. This applies to every job at every level in an organisation
Completing tasks quicker is the dimension that attracts most attention.
Expanding the scope and importance of the tasks done is at least as important, and I would argue, are where the real productivity benefits beyond costs as currently defined in a P&L hide.
We risk becoming less conscientious, less determined to get the facts straight when they are delivered to our inbox, all packaged up. This is a danger, as it erodes the capacity for creativity and critical thinking. However, being aware of a risk is 90% of being able to set boundaries and manage it.
AI can deliver momentum. Simple, repetitive tasks can be automated, leaving time and headspace for the stuff that builds ‘flow’. This is the state from which the most valuable outcomes always emerge. Ignoring the potential for AI to deliver momentum will see your competition race past you.
Use AI to smash those organisational silos and deliver the benefits.
