Good morning. Generative AI is set to transform business, but what does it mean for your people? Lynda Gratton, a human capital expert and professor of management practice at London Business School, wants C-suite leaders to keep that question in mind.
During an interesting MIT Sloan Management Review webinar yesterday, “What AI means for human capital,” Gratton discussed how generative AI, with its easily accessible nature and advanced automation, is providing an opportunity to redefine work.
“For me, as a psychologist, the issue is about the nature of work, which is to say, ‘Why do we work? And what do we get out of it?'” she explained. “If we lose sight of that question, then we just become entirely transactional.”
Gratton, also the founder of HSM Advisory, a London-based research advisory group, shared that based on what she’s hearing from clients around the world, there are three main areas where generative AI is affecting a firm’s “people strategy.”
For starters, there’s talent development, which includes recruitment and induction, and career management. “There’s lots of work now being done with chatbots and generative AI to help you understand yourself,” she said. Secondly, there’s productivity, which involves assessment, feedback, skills, training, and managing collaboration. But the area where she’s seeing the most activity is change management—or internal knowledge and external knowledge management.
“I’ve been studying companies now for 30 years, and one of the things that we felt really worried about is that we have so much knowledge in our organizations, but we don’t know where it is,” Gratton explained. “We don’t know how to find it. And it seems to me that this is an area that we’re really focusing on in terms of generative AI.”
For example, the British multinational law firm Allen & Overy LLP is experimenting with generative AI to access all the company’s cases and drafting contracts, she said. McKinsey & Company is using “Lilli” for internal knowledge management. “It’s a platform that provides a streamlined, impartial search and synthesis of the firm’s vast stores of knowledge to bring our best insights, quickly and efficiently, to clients,” according to the firm. Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley is using a generative AI solution to help with wealth management advice to clients, Gratton said.
“It would be a big mistake if we saw generative AI simply as a substitution technology,” she said. “If we want, as humans, to get the most from this amazing technology, we have got to see it as an augmentation process.”
Have a good weekend.
Sheryl Estrada
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