AI isn’t a binary decision for your business. Once we look at task and process completion as the objective, we can start to assign the jobs to the best agent – whether it’s human or machine.
It’s a clickbait world, and people want you to pick a side.
That’s especially true of AI right now. Depending on the headlines you read, AI is going to eliminate white-collar work forever; or it’s a bubble about to burst. Is it going to reshape global economics? Or will AI-generated mistakes and hallucinations crash whole industries?
The shorthand for all this is “man versus machine”. But we don’t think it needs to be that way. The path forward is more subtle (and a lot less likely to grab clicks…).
Our version, then? ‘AI’ is a catch-all terms for a suite of tools that, applied to specific processes and in concert with people who know what they’re doing, can make businesses more efficient, agile, and ready for future developments. (We told you it wasn’t catchy.)
Because while Big Tech, Big AI and blue-chip corporates are looking to speed up what they hope will be a revolution, we see the big challenge of the current tech transition as bringing together the human and technological.
The multi agent workforce
The AI transition has to sit as much in the HR department as it does IT… or finance, customer services or logistics. It’s the folks who can help knit the best tools for the right jobs into the human workforce. We see then as ‘agents’ applying their skill and experience to specific tasks. And if technology – an AI agent – can do some of those tasks for them, everybody wins.
The organizations suited to this multi-agent workforce? Well, it’s a flexible model and designed around processes, so it’s universal.
But we love to work with mid-sized organizations that don’t feel they can fund a talent or tech arms-race. They understand the need to become more efficient; and they don’t want to sit on the sidelines as the tech evolves. But they want solutions to their problems, not to be part of an ever-shifting experiment – or to locked into today’s AI-fix only to find the technology has changed tomorrow.
An ideal solution would give them the capability to knit together world-class talent, AI, and automation – especially now that the barriers to entry have fallen. It should work at the team level – as simply as putting in place an AI agent to handle one process or task. But it should open the door to further deployment as the technology evolves. It’s not an IT project – it’s a new way of working that adapts to people, too.
People and process first
Most IT project failures usually come down to poor understanding of the requirements and lack of change management – not technology failures. That tells us that designing an AI-first solution needs to start with people. It has to look at the end-to-end service – not just the tech, not just the people, but how a process fits in the value chain.
So the smart questions for AI agents are: what parts of a job can they do? And should they do them? Human intervention is not a critical failure. There is always going to be data that’s not right, escalations that require ingenuity. More organizations need relationship building; and they want to give their people time to do interesting work. Those should all be part of the solution, not a problem requiring a more ‘emotional’ chatbot, or one that hallucinates when it’s stuck.
The best bit?
You don’t have to reinvent your business for a new age. And we can help any business design processes and workflows where AI can be applied for maximum effect – and humans remain a key part of the process.
The multi-agent workforce is the right person or AI, doing the right task, at the right time – and adapting over time.
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