If all the enterprises in the world act on their plans to leverage AI to become equally efficient, equally accurate, how will we tell one from another?

Ironically, by the quality of their human touch, the very thing that AI sets out to displace.

But this is not an AI versus human story. Quite the opposite in fact.  Because even as AI takes on many jobs done by people and does them better, it also enables enterprises to take the human interactions that remain to the next level. Incredulous as it seems, AI offers a way to put humanity back into the digital enterprise.

Creating human-centric experiences

For employees:

Artificial Intelligence, combined with analytics and design thinking, can enable enterprises with empathy and insight so they can understand what matters most to people. For millennial and Gen Z employees, a job was always about finding identity, purpose, and work-life balance. When the pandemic happened, these young workers began to question their life-choices and prioritized social and emotional well-being above everything else.

With the great resignation being followed by the great renegotiation, a human-centric employee experience is critical for bringing people back to the post-pandemic workplace. This means respecting employees' identity, providing agency at work, ensuring alignment of purpose, and creating a sense of belonging. Today's generation spends a lot of time on social media and external digital channels, and in turn they seek similar experiences and channels within their organization.

Using various data and models, AI can build employee personas to understand their specific requirements and redesign the employee experience to make it more fulfilling. It can also facilitate collaboration to strengthen human-to-human connections. 

For customers:

Human beings have anthropocentric bias, that is, when it comes to innately "human" tasks, such as communication, they prefer to engage with people, rather than AI even if the latter does the job just as well; the simple knowledge that they are dealing with a machine is enough to bias them against it.

So even if AI is performing most customer service operations, at some point there will be a need for human-to-human interaction.  When someone is looking to make a high-involvement decision, or resolve a complicated issue, they seek empathy and a personalized touch that only a real person can provide. Hence enterprises must build their human skills to garner customer confidence and loyalty. 

AI will help them do this.

With its unmatched analytical abilities, AI can learn, analyze, and remember data - customer needs, behavior, and sentiment - from every interaction and provide that insight to make human-to-human conversations more meaningful. Organizations can also use generative AI tools to create personalized communication campaigns targeted at individual users to improve the quality of (marketing) experience. This will enhance customer satisfaction and business revenue, but more importantly, differentiate the organization as human-centric in the mind of consumers.

A more human AI

By enabling human-centric experiences, AI increases the humanity of the digital enterprise. Enterprises must return the favour by increasing the humanity of AI. With ChatGPT's record breaking growth, generative AI is never out of the news. Often for the wrong reasons - weird responses, factual errors, privacy violation, and even hallucination!

As businesses increase their reliance on AI, they also increase their risk. They need to be very careful in their use of AI or they will face the consequences. Specifically, enterprises should take a human-centric, highly ethical and safe for commercial use approach so they never lose sight of who and what the technology is meant to serve.

Keep it safe:

A top concern should be to safeguard the privacy and confidentiality of the data used for training AI models. Enterprises must establish robust security infrastructure and regular vulnerability assessments. Understanding the sources and ownership of data, controlling its flow, and managing consent for use, must all be part of the security discipline. Some organizations have chief customer protection officers, and most large corporations have a risk committee on their board to oversee these requirements.

Keep it honest:

AI training data must be used with consent. Any use of AI-generated content should be declared clearly. Not only consent but responsibility is also important to reflect the fact that AI is trained based on data and if data is not correct, the results can be devastating.

Keep it sustainable:

Generative AI uses large language models with hundreds of billions of parameters that cost an enormous amount of energy and water to train. But larger does not mean better; therefore, enterprises should optimize the size of the model by using high-quality training data, which will lower resource consumption.

Keep it ethical:

Because AI still does not have an appreciation of business context, or emotional intelligence, it can make mistakes with severe consequences. For example, drawing purely on training data, AI can produce biased or offensive outputs, without even realizing it. Organizations should use the technology responsibly, so it enhances the experience of employees, customers, and any other people it touches. Most importantly, there should be a human in the loop to review the results to make sure they are free of bias and error.

To embrace AI is human

Increasing AI calls for more human-centric behaviour from enterprises. AI is great in a supporting role, but human beings want to deal with real people in important circumstances. They also want to be valued as individuals in every interaction. Hence, AI must be leveraged to promote human-centric experiences. It must also be used in a respectful way towards human beings; keeping a human in the loop is one of the ways to get better at this.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shridhar Iyengar Raman, is the Global Head of Sales and Digital Experience at Infosys where he has been a trusted advisor, working with clients over the last two decades, helping them with their journey in an ever-changing technology landscape.