🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
AI is expected to grow annually at 37.3% from 2023 to 2030. The next few years will likely be a rocket ship in both the pace and breadth of AI adoption. AI will soon become transformational across all aspects of our professional and personal lives. We are at the beginning of the first stage of this age of transformation.
What Factors Are Driving AI Adoption?
• Simple applications made AI more understandable, consumable, and attainable by a significant audience
• The promise of process automation, logical analysis, and the freedom to work on more impactful and higher-level tasks
• Computing capabilities made AI development accessible and economically feasible with acceptable performance and accuracy
• AI success stories are more plentiful and visible
What Can Be Done To Navigate the AI Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt?
Change can be scary, and the lack of understanding and fear drive inaction. There are steps to navigate this initial period of uncertainty intentionally and more effectively.
• Be Realistic in Mindset and Focus
Mistaken or ill-formed predictions create fears of things or events that will not happen, and we must push back on these mistakes. This mindset shifts reasonable discussions of the usefulness and potential of the technology to the background, creating a tech panic.
Remember Amara's law: We tend to overestimate technology's effect in the short run and underestimate the long-term impact.
• Forget Hollywood: Don't Let Fear of the Unknown Create Inaction
AI will evolve over time and not suddenly and unexpectedly. There are many potential use cases for AI. Seek ways to educate yourself and your teams on effectively using and working with AI. Start with AI types such as conversational AI and generative AI and imagine the possibilities. Place the customer and employees at the center of brainstorming to create business speed, agility, and reliability. Focus on what makes customer and employee experience simple, easy, and frictionless.
• Don't View AI As Magic
It is hard to know or visualize the limitations of AI. Initial implementations may be flawed, and mistakes will happen. Give the time and leniency to get it right.
• Think and Act on Disruption for Good
AI can free employees' time and focus on becoming more efficient and strategic and improving their satisfaction. Like other technology disruptive advances, be transparent with employees that the goal is work simplification and job transformation, not elimination.
However, you should seek ways to educate yourself and your business colleagues on how to use and work with AI effectively and to your benefit.
AI has the potential to create:
• Advances in many of the most critical aspects of our lives, like health and financial welfare.
• Personalized experiences and interactions with brands. Brands will know about you and interact with you regarding your wants and needs.
• Simpler lives. AI and human intelligence can minimize arduous daily activities and make things easier.
• Process mining. AI can eliminate too many overlapping processes to achieve goals.
• Higher level of human engagement. AI will gather and formulate more accurate data, but it will take human creative thinking and ingenuity to make critical decisions.
• Elimination of repetitive, time-consuming, mundane tasks.
• Create AI Designed Only To Do No Harm
AI inputs, outputs, and work must be humanly readable, auditable, and understandable to fix mistakes. AI must not be designed to manipulate people or organizations, have no surveillance, or be used as a strategy for widespread job displacement. AI must protect individual privacy and eliminate bias to create a level playing field.
• Make AI Accessible to the Masses
We must ensure AI is available to all and not just the elite. AI processing and ownership should not be tied to a tiny few technology leaders with lots of data centers and computing resources. AI should work on-premise and in the cloud. Intentionally manage the pace of innovation, so more people and organizations can keep up. We must encourage core AI concepts and designs to be open-sourced to help overcome technical obstacles so the fundamentals are widely known by humanity.
• AI Legislation and Standards Must Have Similar Requirements to Humans
Legislators should get the best minds worldwide from the public and private sectors working on ethics and societal standards that produce actionable, realistically feasible results. Policymakers should remember the long history of tech panics, recognize where AI is in the current panic cycle, and remain calm. Legislators must use caution when digesting theoretical concerns that diminish discussions of more immediate and valid problems. It's paramount not to overreact when formulating policy to avoid unduly harming AI innovation with misguided laws and regulations.
• Develop a Comprehensive Approach to AI Data Privacy
Brands, governments, institutions, and companies must be transparent about the specific data collected and how data processing is controlled and secured. These entities should not allow AI to assume, without a factual foundation, to make recommendations or inform decisions. Individuals must own their data and have the capabilities to opt out.
• Put Security Front and Center
AI misinformation is pulling attention away from the actual risk, such as new cybersecurity threats, including deep fakes, hallucinations, and unique intellectual property concerns. Bad actors exist, and more come each day, regardless of AI. Assume the business's information and technology are under attack and build protection and response capabilities accordingly. Robust security measures such as system operations protections, AI algorithm and model protection, and maintaining data record ownership must be put in place.
AI opens new attack vectors such as system manipulation, AI model data corruption, transfer learning attacks, online system manipulation, and data privacy.
Summary
We are at the beginning of the coming AI transformation. There needs to be more knowledge, and misleading information makes it harder to focus on AI benefits. Analyzing the use of AI in your business and life with a practical lens is critical.