AI Gunning for the Corner Office

One out of every five CEOs consider corporate culture a main driver of performance and a big contributor to the bottomline. However, most execs also agree that company culture is often poorly understood and not where it needs to be.

Research cited by Professor Don Sull of the MIT Sloan School of Management, and cofounder of CultureX, found that the standard barometer of corporate culture – the periodic engagement survey – offers few useful insights. Besieging staff members with long lists of multiple-choice questions is a surefire way to cause them zone out and provide meaningless answers.

Predictably, artificial intelligence is about to come to the rescue of execs anxious to improve corporate culture but clueless where to begin. AI can replace mind-numbing surveys with reams of data gleaned from internal and external sources to assemble a much more nuanced picture. It also allows staff members to explain, in their own (spoken) words, their impressions and experiences. Crude tools such as word clouds and keyword searches may be binned.

World’s Best Employer

With its ambition to become the best employer in the world, Amazon has already deployed AI to gain insights, in granular detail, of the company’s compliance with its stated core values. The patterns emerging from this exercise enable different levels of management to uncover possibly toxic subcultures, pinpoint areas of attrition, and map employee thoughts and gauge levels of engagement. This, in turn, allows for a highly effective fine tuning of policies and procedures.

The first results are in and unveiled that Amazon’s twin ‘customer obsession’ and ‘invent and simplify’ culture causes employee burnout. Sceptics might convincingly argue that no AI is needed to draw that conclusion. However, AI also found that the burnout rate is twice as high amongst software engineers than under warehouse staff and drivers. AI also pointed to the company’s performance-review process – considered notoriously brutal by most – as the cause of engineer burnouts. Frequent after-hour appeals to professionals also contributed.

According to Professor Sull, the goal of deploying AI as a gauge of corporate culture is to make employees happier, and more productive, and lower a company’s exposure to reputational risk. Moreover, the professor expects that, given time, AI may come to define corporate culture and decipher the mystery that has long surrounded it.

However, the managers using AI to improve their own performance may soon be on the chopping block. In a survey conducted amongst CEOs in the United States, Sweden, France, Brazil, Thailand, and a few other countries, c-suite members almost unanimously agree that AI will profoundly change the nature of their job. They envision AI taking over mundane administrative tasks – the ones that take time but do not add significant value – allowing them to devote more attention to, say, strategy development, innovation, and complex multilevel decision-making.

Agility

This change also demands new management skills. The ‘agile leader’ – touted as one being humble, adaptable, engaged, and visionary – seems best suited to thrive and prosper in the AI era.

The fallacy contained herein, and often overlooked, is that all levels of management, from the shop floor to the corner office, can quite easily be entrusted to AI. And why not? To quote the late Professor Robert Buzzell, a forty-year veteran of Harvard Business School, an MBA is easily and instantly recognisable for “being often wrong but seldom in doubt.”

MBA graduates are usually highly valued for their ability to analyse and comprehend a vast universe of business scenarios, discern trends, trace the shortest route to success, unearth synergies, and/or map under-explored areas ready for exploitation. As such, these exceptionally bright people are not unlike chess players who survey the scene, draw a mental map of all eventualities, decide on a strategy, and embark on the pursuit of victory.

There is quite literally nothing in this that cannot be done by artificial intelligence – and probably be done better and cheaper. Even the cherished ability to find creative solutions to complex problems balancing the interests of all stakeholders is not a trait reserved for lateral thinking humans. It too can be reduced (abstracted) into the tiniest constituent parts, each assigned a specific value based on relevance, for an equitable outcome – and a decision carefully considered and easily defensible.

Fatalistic CEOs

Again, and this time rather surprisingly, most CEOs seem to agree that AI imperils their role and ultimately their job. EdX, an online learning platform set up by administrators at Harvard and MIT, surveyed hundreds of executives in the US and discovered that almost half of them – 47% – think that ‘most’ or ‘all’ of their work can and should be automated or replaced by AI.

EdX founder Anant Agarwal, quoted in the New York Times, speculates that up to 80% of the average CEOs workload is ready for AI. He tags writing, synthesising, and employee management as the first tasks to be offloaded. Mr Agarwal also predicts that AI will ‘democratise’ the job of top management even as its role is diminished.

Whilst a favourite topic in science fiction writing, the ‘robot boss’ does not (yet) seem to scare staff. In a 2017 poll of one thousand British workers, 42% said they would feel ‘comfortable’ taking orders from a computer. Jack Ma, former chief executive of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, was not surprised and pointed out that AI is quicker and more rational than humans and does not suffer from bias or emotion. It merely hallucinates once in a while, but AI engineers promise vertiginous improvements in performance as they work out quirks and teething problems. 

For workers at the lower end of the corporate pay scale worried about their livelihoods, AI gunning for the corner office may offer a measure of solace or schadenfreude. However, those pleasures will likely be short-lived as black factories and black offices run by black boxes usher in a post-human era where – give it time – nearly everybody has become superfluous to requirements. And what then?

Cover photo: Soon to be vacated: the c-suite and associated accoutrements.

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© 2018 photo by GoodFon