AI Orientated Culture

AI will increasingly disrupt business, so cultural changes are needed to prepare organisations and their employees to embrace it.

An AI friendly culture includes the following features:

·      Vision driven organisation that competes on purpose.

·      Culture of questioning. AI will overtake human ability to answer questions - humans are better at asking questions, so encourage a questioning culture.

·      Decision making science will grow so asking AI to “Give new evidence that I’m right” is wrong approach.

·      Geared towards human emotions.   

·      Deals with the challenge of discounting one’s own expertise because an organisations ability to be right is a function of individuals readiness to be proved wrong.

·      Ethics is part of daily decisions.

·      Regulators will not be able to keep up, so self-regulation is important.

·      Structural Alignment of employee and company cultures – win-win mind-set.

·      The organisation deals with the fear of AI impact on jobs with focus on human + AI.

Organisational Structure.

Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman at the World Economic Forum explains, “In the future, it will not be the big fish that eats the small fish, it will be the fast fish that eats the slow fish.[i]” AI is undoubtedly driving organisational speed through accelerating decision-making, and helping drive automation. Recent research by Cognizant and Economist Intelligence Unit[ii], found many companies beginning to transition away from rigid organizational models to smaller and nimbler clusters of talent with expertise to excel in a particular market or niche.

Traditionally, companies used to be organized in strict hierarchies with fixed reporting lines and responsibilities. If information needs to be shared with different organisational units, it typically had to travel up a few levels before trickling down somewhere else. But according to a study by Deloitte, in today's businesses, many companies have adapted a kind of mesh[iii], where the various departments are no longer organized in a strict hierarchy, but directly connected to each other, with varying degrees of dependency on others.

While this organizational structure allows for more flexibility than the hierarchical model, it doesn’t really help align the organization move towards common goals. So a more promising approach is to structure the organisation in small, fully-resourced teams focussed on tasks, projects and processes that collectively align with overall organisational strategy.     

Getting organisations to change requires the following to be made explicit:

1. Need for change
2. Vision of a better future
3. Capability to change
4. Cost of change
5. Benefit of change

[i] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/02/are-you-ready-for-the-technological-revolution/

[ii] https://www.cognizant.com/whitepapers/organizational-change-management-a-make-or-break-capability-for-digital-success-codex2395.pdf

[iii] https://www2.deloitte.com/insights/us/en/focus/human-capital-trends/2017/organization-of-the-future.html

Useful Resources 

https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-teach-artificial-intelligence-common-sense/ And www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-04-04/artificial-intelligence-research-might-have-hit-a-wall

Blue Brain Project, EPFL – École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

Human Connectome Project, Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute, USC

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World, Pedro Domingos, 2015

CYC - the world's longest-lived artificial intelligence project attempting to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and "rules of thumb" about how the world works (Wiki)

Howard Gardner, John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education  

Alan Turing (1950) Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind 49: 433-460 , 1 . The Imitation Game

In the BBC reported that the test has been passed 2014, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27762088 - but there has been much criticism of the idea that a chatbot could exhibit behaviour that is comprehensively indistinguishable from a human - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/09/scientists-disagree-over-whether-turing-test-has-been-passed.