By Nishant Kumar Behl, Director of Emerging Technologies at OneAdvanced
AI is transforming the way we work now and will continue to make great strides into the future. In many of its forms, it demonstrates exceptional accuracy and a high rate of correct responses. Some people worry that AI is too powerful, with the potential to cause havoc on our socio-political and economic systems. There is a converse narrative, too, that highlights some of the surprising and often comical mistakes that AI can produce, perhaps with the intention of undermining people’s faith in this emerging technology.
This tendency to scrutinise the occasional AI mishap despite its frequent correct responses overshadows the technology’s overall reliability, creating an unfairly high expectation for perfection. With a singular focus on failure, it is, therefore, no surprise that almost 80% of AI projects fail within a year. Considering all of the hype around AI and particularly GenAI over the past few years, it is understandable that users feel short-changed when their extravagant expectations are not met.
We shouldn’t forget that a lot of the most useful software we all rely on in our daily working lives contains bugs. They are an inevitable and completely normal byproduct of developing and writing code. Take a look at the internet, awash with comments, forums, and advice pages to help users deal with bugs in commonly used Apple and Microsoft word processing and spreadsheet apps.
If we can accept blips in our workhorse applications, why are we holding AI to such a high standard? Fear plays a part here. Some may fear AI can do our jobs to a much higher standard than we can, sidelining us. No technology is smarter than humans. As technology gets smarter, it pushes humans to become smarter. When we collaborate with AI, the inputs of humans and artificial intelligence work together, and that’s when magic happens.
AI frees up more human time and lets us be creative, focusing on more fulfilling tasks while the technology does the heavy lifting. But AI is built by humans and will continue to need people asking the right questions and making connections based on our unique human sensibility and perception if it is to become more accurate, useful, and better serve our purpose.
The fear of failing to master AI implementation might be quite overwhelming for organisations. In some cases, people are correct in being cautious. There is a tendency now to expect all technology solutions to have integrated AI functionality for the sake of it, which is misguided. Before deciding on any technology, users must first identify and understand the problem they are trying to solve and establish whether AI is indeed the best solution. Don’t be blinded by science and adopt the whistles and bells that aren’t going to deliver the best results.
Uncertainty and doubt will continue to revolve around the subject of AI, but people should be reassured that there are many reliable, ethical technology providers developing safe, responsible, compliant AI-powered products. These organisations recognise their responsibility to develop products that offer long-term value rather than generating temporary buzz. By directly engaging with customers to understand their needs and problems, a customer-focused approach helps identify whether AI can effectively address the issues at hand before proceeding down the AI route.
In any organisation, the leader’s job is to develop strategy, ask the right questions, provide direction, and often devise action plans. When it comes to AI, we will all need to adopt that leadership mindset in the future, ensuring we are developing the right strategy, asking insightful questions, and devising an effective action plan that enables the engineers to execute appropriate AI solutions for our needs.
Organisations should not be afraid to experiment with AI solutions and tools, remembering that in every successful innovation, there will be some failure and frustration. The light bulb moments rarely happen overnight, and we must all adjust our expectations so that AI can offer a perfect solution. There will be bugs and problems, but the journey towards improvement will result in achieving long-term and sustainable value from AI, where everyone can benefit.
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Nishant Kumar Behl is Director of Emerging Technologies at OneAdvanced, a leading provider of sector-focussed SaaS software, headquartered in the UK.
