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PHOTO: Ida Kammerloch

Artificial intelligence has been making its way into the workplace for a few years now, whether in the form of AI-driven search platforms, rudimentary chatbots or voice-enabled assistants. But with the promise of AI comes some caveats. 

As much as we hear businesses proclaim the power of AI to augment employee effort, workers are wary of the potential loss of jobs as artificial intelligence grows more capable. For every promise of retraining and freedom from mundane tasks, there's another story of layoffs caused by workplace automation

Another monkey wrench currently holding machine learning back from reaching its full potential is the abysmal state of data within most organizations. As Data Quality Solutions President Thomas C. Redman wrote in Harvard Business Review this week,  "Poor data quality is enemy number one to the widespread, profitable use of machine learning."

During a recent Tweet Jam, panelists discussed the good and the bad of artificial intelligence in the workplace and shared emerging best practices on how to introduce AI-driven technology to your organization. 

If AI Sounds Too Good to Be True, It Probably Is

According to Gartner's 2017 Hype Cycle, machine learning has reached the tipping point from peak of inflated expectations and has begun its descent into the trough of disillusionment. While the research firm touts the payoffs of a well-executed AI strategy, it cautions against inflated expectations of systems that can "magically perform any intellectual task a human can do and dynamically learn."

So how can businesses seeking to tap the power of AI successfully do so without falling prey to the hype? Part of the solution lies in setting up realistic goals in advance of introducing the technology, much as they (should) do with any other tech initiative.  

Putting Artificial Intelligence to Work

Businesses have successfully introduced AI to help automate mundane tasks, streamline contact center interactions, parse through big data and augment search. But it's still early days as businesses still work out where and how AI can best help their organizations and ready their data and the required staff to support their initiatives. With Gartner reporting 85 percent of CIOs planning to pilot an AI initiative by 2020, the one thing that's certain is to expect AI to turn up in more areas of the business in the near future.

Can't Have Intelligent Workplaces With Dirty Data

The Tweet Jam panelists shared their top three recommendations to prepare for an AI initiative:

  1. Clean your data.
  2. Clean your data.
  3. Clean your data.

Other recommendations included creating strong change management processes around the technology roll out, mapping out the processes that will be augmented or automated in advance, and ensuring you have the right people in place to supervise and make sense of any machine learning results.

My Chatbot, My Co-Worker

As mentioned earlier, chatbots in the workplace promise to alleviate employees from having to perform mundane tasks and streamline information retrieval. However, pushing chatbots into areas they don't belong (looking at you, online communities) will result in alienating employees. Introducing chatbots also raises the risk of creating fear in employees of possible job eliminations. The panelists recommended using chatbots to augment rather than replace human effort, as well as including ethical considerations at the onset of ideation.

Is AI Coming for Our Jobs?

Depending on the news source, AI is either the best thing that's happened to the workforce or the worst. The truth most likely lies in between.

Some companies will inevitably take advantage of automation and other AI-driven technology to downsize their workforce, but just as many will turn to it to help their workers cut through the information overload to find what they need. The long-term implications remain to be seen, but the panelists remained cautiously optimistic on the prognosis. They recommended businesses take an employee-first approach to AI use and in cases where jobs are made redundant, suggested offering training to employees in more specialized tasks. 

Searching for the 'Intelligent Workplace'

Looking for the intelligent workplace? Not so fast, said the Tweet Jam panelists. Start by appreciating the people who already make your workplace "intelligent," then look for ways to move your business to the next level, with small, thoughtful initiatives. While you may never achieve the idealized version of the fully automated workplace, that might not be the worst thing.