How will Artificial Intelligence help organizations, teams and workers develop a new normal? This is an important question when it comes to remote and hybrid work. By eliminating some of the mundane tasks, and making it easier to get answers, how we spend our time, indeed how we define what we do for work, will change over the next months and years.
Specifically, here are some ways to consider using the new tools available to help optimize you and your team’s work.
- More efficient information sharing. One of the big worries about the team not sharing a workspace is that they won’t be able to share information or get timely answers to their questions. A well-programmed AI can eliminate at least some of those concerns. Imagine asking for information and getting answers that lead to richer solutions. For example, if I ask Bob what we sold to a specific customer in the past, he might know. But asking a good AI the same question will reveal all past conversations with that client, invoices they’ve received, and conversations the team had about them on Teams or Slack. This way you don’t just get the facts, but additional context, regardless of whether you are all in the same place or not.
- Increased productivity. The beauty (and the perceived threat to many) of AI is the ability to automate many time-intensive tasks leaving people free for higher-value work and thinking. One of the unexpected challenges of this, is that many people use simple tasks to help them take mental breaks, and deadlines and simple work often helps people stay in “work mode.” It remains to be seen if too much unstructured time impacts remote work long-term.
- Privacy and Security. AI will not only be able to define security protocols and identify threats, it will also know which sources for material are secure, what is proprietary information and can be shared, or what sources are insecure or untrustworthy. It will put constraints on available information and sources, but that’s not always a bad thing.
- Collaboration and Communication. Among its other advantages, AI doesn’t sleep, take holidays, or switch shifts. If you create material, you don’t have to be “on duty” for your colleagues to find it. If you (like me) tend to save things in the wrong place, AI is more likely to find it than a panicky co-worker. It can also find additional material that will be relevant to the work.
All of this is possible, but that doesn’t mean it will happen or happen the way you expect. Everything AI does should be passed through your human brain before your work depends on it. Just cutting and pasting can result in embarrassment or even legal problems.
Just as an example, a Chat GPT search for “author Wayne Turmel,” credited me with a book I didn’t write and a degree I don’t have from a university I never attended. This will likely improve over time. (The rest of the article was both accurate and flattering, so there’s that.)
It will take time, practice and a lot of frustration before you and your team find the best way to use these new tools. But it will become more common and if you want to move to a more efficient hybrid or remote model, will become indispensable.
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