Why AI Won’t Deliver Better Results Without Human Judgement

Make no mistake, generative AI represents a crisis.

Not necessarily one with terrible, life-threatening outcomes - compared to a pandemic, for example - but it’s certainly as disruptive and as dangerous to companies if it’s not taken seriously.

Talking of the Covid pandemic, look at what happened in its wake, in terms of a company’s operations: remote working, giving autonomy to employees, and flexibility were intrinsic to UK PLC. Most of these changes have stuck (thankfully), and company bosses have largely learned to rethink how their enterprises can work.

More than two years later, in November 2022, ChatGPT emerged, trailblazing a similarly transformative path.

Generative AI is making an even bigger bang and creating an even bigger disruption. It’s already shaping businesses, but not necessarily in the right way. In comparison to the pandemic - where we all had to abide by the same rules and make the same sacrifices - a company’s approach to AI can differ wildly from the next.

Some companies, excited by the potential cost savings, are using AI to reduce their reliance on people. Yet generative AI doesn’t understand its work in the way a human does, nor can it accept responsibility for the consequences. It can produce impressive results in one setting and plausible but seriously flawed answers in another, which makes replacing human judgement with AI very different from using AI to strengthen it.

Don’t misunderstand us: AI is fantastic, it really is. It can help and assist humans to be better, more productive, and more innovative. It enables us to work smarter, not harder. But its full effect only comes into play when a human is at the wheel.

The question is whether your people are ready to shape and steer AI so that it genuinely improves their work. Research has found meaningful productivity gains in some roles, particularly where tasks are clearly defined and users can recognise a good answer, but those gains aren’t universal. In other settings, AI has made experienced people slower while leaving them convinced that they were working faster.

That makes the human role more important, not less. Employees need to understand where AI is useful, how its output should be tested and when a decision requires knowledge or accountability that the technology cannot provide. Without those capabilities, a company may adopt AI widely without becoming more productive or making better decisions.

Generative AI demands an open approach, a change mindset, and critical thinkers. If you’re uninformed about its capabilities, you risk your informed competitors sailing past you to heightened success you can only dream of.

For too many companies, ‘easy’ outstrips ‘effectiveness’.

It’s easy to do what you’ve always done, to follow the status quo, to not challenge anything, to not look for better. The same goes for your workers: how many of them turn up to work and just do what they’ve been told to do? How many do you have in your workforce who actively want to better their position, and ergo, the company they work for? Which of your employees would actively challenge you? Do any of them offer a diversity of thought from yours? If none do, you have an office full of sheeple, not free-thinking people. Which of these do you imagine will help your company grow?

It’s perhaps unfair to pin downward, insular, reactive operations on the workforce, as it could be the culture your company fosters. Where no one dares, and therefore no cares, to put forward a new idea. If that’s the case, AI won’t be able to help you.

According to a renowned quote, people only change in a crisis. Well, the time has come. When did you look objectively at your staff and assess their skills? There are so many knowledge gaps and skills shortages nowadays, internal mobility is the key to growth. Whichever way you look at it, and whichever technologies you put in place, your success still comes down to the people on your payroll.

When AI Isn’t Producing the Results You Expected

If your organisation has started using AI but the promised gains haven’t materialised, the problem may not be the technology itself. Results are shaped by the information people give it, the assumptions they bring to its answers, and their confidence in challenging an output that looks convincing.

Evolve3 CIC helps founders and teams examine how AI is influencing decisions across their organisation. Our AI scrutiny training reveals where people may be accepting outputs too readily, where responsibility has become unclear, and where human judgement needs to be strengthened.

If you want to understand what’s preventing AI from delivering better results in your business, get in touch to discuss what greater scrutiny could uncover.