Forget AI First! Put your People First!

AI First is synonymous with AI Fomo, the term prays on business leaders who feel like they’re missing out. This is mainly due to the obscurity of the meaning that gets muddled by the hype. I am all for leveraging AI for automation and productivity, but it needs to make sense. Lessons from companies such as Klarna and IBM have shown us that blind replacement can go horribly wrong. So, what should be the strategy?

AI Harmonic

Let me introduce a new buzz term to add to your hypecabulary; AI Harmonic is half-way between AI First and AI Enabled. It recognises that businesses do not become market leading by increased productivity alone. It puts people first, and acknowledges that passionate and curious individuals supported by both people and machines provide the most value.

So the strategy becomes: employ AI in use-cases they perform well. For genAI this is parsing unstructured data to interpolate, compress, extract or transform – it is not to think, problem-solve, network, and innovate – this is where your people come in. Put these tools in their hands, invest in them, watch them drive value, flourish, and grow. We should not be creating an “us vs them” scenario, it should be a harmony.

If you’re at all skeptical about this approach, ask your favourite LLM “give me a number between 0 and 25”, without any prior context or custom instruction. If its answer is 17 I rest my case.