Name: Brainstorm AI 2023: Using AI to Reimagine the World of Work
Uploaded: 2023-12-13
Duration: 14 min 56 s
Description: Paul Daugherty, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, Accenture Moderator: Alan Murray, Chief Executive Officer, FORTUNE

Paul Daugherty, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, Accenture Moderator: Alan Murray, Chief Executive Officer, FORTUNE

Brainstorm AI 2023: Using AI to Reimagine the World of Work

Conferences

So an ongoing conversation that we're having at this year's event is of course, what A I means for the workforce and how we can train employees to work alongside artificial intelligence in a way that also improves their own experience of the workplace. Um We're going to be discussing this in a second with our next speaker, Paul Doherty, who is the Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at Accenture, and he'll be interviewed by Fortune Ceo Alan Murray. But before we hear from those two, please watch this video from our founding partner Accenture Reinvention. It's how retailers can use the power of A I for the benefit of all personalizing consumer experiences without bias and giving employees new capabilities to supercharge what they do, where could reinvention, take your business accenture? Let there be change. Paul, thank you for being here and thanks for supporting this event. I think it's, it's been uh uh I I everybody here has been really engaged in the conversation for a great event, a great buzz, a lot of great uh dialogue going on there. So thanks for being part of it. Look, uh uh we've heard a lot of examples over the last uh uh the last two days of companies that are using A I and generative A I to make uh extraordinary productivity gains. But they're anecdotal. You've deal with accenture, deals with more customers than anybody on this stuff. You have thousands of customers that you're working with. Uh where are you seeing the biggest gains? Is this really revolutionary or is it, is it more hype than uh reality? Now, the, we believe it's clearly more reality than hype. But of course, there's always a lot of hype with any new technology. And I think the exciting thing and the thing that creates this hype perception around, around generative A I is, is the fact that it's so human like it's like it's the first technology where it's like looking in the mirror, you know, no other technology has really been like that. And I think the and technology really is going to continue to become more human like as you look at what becomes beyond generative A I as well. And I think that creates a lot of misperceptions around individuals and work and how work happens. And one thing I've been saying is we might be well served by taking the word artificial out of A I and just focusing on intelligence because at the end of the day, that's what we're, what we're really trying to create is a greater intelligence by combining the human and the, and the machine capability. And we as you said we work, we see a lot across a lot of industries around the world. We've had thousands of conversations with, with clients on generative A I. You can't have a conversation that's not about generative A I anymore. And we've done hundreds now of projects with clients on Generative A I. And there's 33 things that, that we believe based on that work we're doing. The first is that, that this will lead to the reinvention of companies. And you saw a little bit about that in the video, but it's things like in a telco where we're working on a customer care example, our customer care implementation, generative A I in the call center. In this case, 30% increase in productivity and 65% better experience as measured by the customer in terms of what they get back in drug discovery, looking at dramatically impacting timelines. I think that there's been some other sessions here talking about that in places like energy, looking at how you can take tremendous cost out of the industry overruns on capital projects by by bringing in new forms of generative A I that can do things you couldn't do previously so that we see this reinvention of companies, we believe that will redefine leaders. So as we look at the Fortune 500 as one benchmark going forward, more change going forward that even the tremendous change looking to the past because we're seeing a big gap, you know between how companies are pursuing it that's going to lead to disproportionate performance. And then the third takeaway is uh is the fact we really believe this is about human potential and human potential, both on the productivity side and the creative side. And those are the, the three, you know, key things. Uh you know that we're seeing in the, in the early days when you talk about, you, you mentioned the telco example with 30% improvement in productivity. When you talk about productivity numbers like that, inevitably, that raises the question of is that, does that just mean that you're gonna have massive layoffs in the uh customer service area or in the other areas where this is being implemented, what you've seen in terms? Or is there reason to be worried about lack of jobs? I think the biggest worry is, is uh is, is the jobs for the people who don't, who won't be using generative A I, you know, the, I think that's the big transition that we're in and most, you know, for our company, the way we look at it is is that we don't, we don't really need less people, we need more people who can work with generative A I in different ways. This impacts our company as, as much as any company. When you look at software engineering and coding, the things that we're doing and that's the same discussion we have even with this particular company, I was talking about, this wasn't about workforce reduction, it was better outcomes and more growth and more productivity uh and impact that they could get to their workforce. Now, there will be some consolidation. Productivity means you need less people to do the same thing. The question is people want to do more things as well. And uh that's where we'll continue to see a lot of focus and the big, you know, the things I'd say you need to focus on are, are three things you need to think about work and how work changes which and I again, think about intelligence rather than artificial versus human intelligence and how it changes that you need to think about that really dramatically reimagining the work in the way it happens rather than just applying technology in this into what how work happens today. The second is the workforce, which is what you're getting at. Where do I need more people? Where do I need less people? What skills do I need? We have something called our R 12, our required 12, which are the 12 things we need at scale to continue to drive gender of A I in our business. I suggest every company developed the same, you know, in terms of what does that look like R 12, I mean, these are the skills you need specific skills in this, in a variety of different skills across the 12. 1 of it is, is around the understanding the change skills that you need to, to drive, you know, processes across human machine. And other is prompt engineering, you know, which is probably a basic one. But there's, you know, this set of, but, but talk a little more about that. This phrase, prompt Engineering is kind of an interesting one. I mean, three or four years ago, what everybody was saying was, oh, you know, you've got to go to coding school, you got to have technical skills. If you don't have technical skills, you're not going to be employed. Now, we've had so many conversations here over the last two days about human in the loop. You talk about prompt engineering. People who understand how to use the tools smartly, who have the judgment to be able to uh uh manage the guard rails when the, when the technology goes astray, how do you train people for that? The uh you need to do it on multiple levels. So the training, there's a, there's a level of cultural training that you need to do that we believe touches everyone. We have something called TQ technology quotient, which is that for all of our 700,000 people at accenture and A I has been a part of that. So all of our people have been trained in A I now they're all, you know, learning about generative A I, no matter what their role is in the company because everybody needs to understand it to some extent, because they need to think about and understand how it's impacting our jobs and help shape how it's going to impact their jobs. Then there, then there's breaking it down into uh the specific skills you need in different professions in, you know, as you mentioned in coders. So how is the job of coder changing again? We believe we need more, not less going forward but the what, you know, but you need them to be doing different things. We talk about shifting left and you know, doing different things in the software development life cycle. And some of when you look at legal professionals or paralegals versus lawyers, you look at you in the call center, you look at plant engineers in refineries. It's about looking at that work change and then modeling what are the new skills that people that, that are required? So that's what we're doing in detail for every job category across every industry. And you know, kind of looking at what that change in profile looks like and how do you prepare people? So what's your advice? I want to open it up by the way to questions. So if you have any actually raise your hand now so we can get the microphone uh to you. Uh There's a question over here but what's your while we're, while we're setting up for that? What's your advice? This is a big journey. Uh You're talking about reinvention. Uh companies are saying, OK, how do I get ready for this? How do I get my workforce ready for this? What is your advice to companies that are uh beginning this journey? The first piece of advice I'd start with is uh invest more in the people than the technology. I think those that, that really focus on the people are going to be the ones that are successful. And uh we, we have the underpinning of what I just was talking about with these roles across industries is that we've done a comprehensive research that shows that 44% of working hours, 44% of working hours across industries will be impacted by generative A I. Uh it's up to, it's close to 80% in banking. It's, it's less in some industries and you need to prepare for that future. And there's five steps, you know, we think you need to take to prepare for that future. They're not all around workforce, but this is the key to driving success. And the first is having a value led approach that sounds like a consultancy thing to say and sounds obvious but not not many companies doing that by value led. We mean looking at the at across your whole value chain at everywhere where you need to apply generative A I and building that in a systematic manner of the business case in mind rather than just doing experimentation on use case and shifting from this use case mindset to value chain is really a big change. We need to see in 2024 as companies shift out of the use case mode of 2023. The second thing is build a gen a ready digital core. We believe geno of A I requires a fundamentally different and new enterprise architecture. There's new intelligence layer, there's a new gen a backbone that you need, that can do things like isolate you from changes and isolate you from training differences across models. So you can get the results you need in the business and you need to invest in that. The third is this change around talent and workforce and developing your change competency and the learning capabilities around that. The fourth is responsible A I done intentionally because uh there's a big a big gap there as well. 95% of executives say they, they believe in responsible A I and they're going to manage the risks. 95% 6% have responsible A I programs in place in the company. It's a big gap between, between intent and execution. And then the fifth point is it's a continuous uh reinvention. I think there's a lot of people that think this is a find my big use case and go and it's a big shot success. We believe this is a multiyear reinvention. You need to again, look across the value chain set that architecture carefully prepare your workforce and it's a multiyear change program. Wow, that's good advice. Thank you for those five question right over here. Uh Good morning. My name is Raquel Rodriguez. I'm associate general counsel at the A S Corporation, a renewable uh energy company. Something that we're struggling with is um the cultural integration of A I at our company. Uh People are afraid people are resistant. They wanna keep uh doing their work the same way. They've always done it. So what have you seen work in terms of motivating and encouraging people to adopt? A I, the uh I think there's a gap a lot, but there's a gap also, I think between in companies of understanding, I think the main thing I'd encourage is back to what I said earlier around the education and cultural, you know, sharing and learning across the organization. There's some research we're going to release shortly. That's where we asked executives about the disruption they expect to their workforce. And 80% said there's not going to be a lot of disruption. There's not going to be a lot of reduction in their workforce. There's gonna be a lot of change in learning and education, but the workers don't believe it, you know, they're, they're afraid. So 50% of workers are really afraid for their jobs and what this is going to mean. So there's a disconnect between the executive mindset and intent and the employees. And I think that's where, you know, the training and understanding and learning and sharing the mindset of where you're going is really important to bring people along because there, there is no A I ready workforce you can hire for a year from now or two years from now or three years from now. If you need a gen A I enabled plant manager for your refinery, you're not going to be able to hire that. You need to bring your workforce with you and develop it, which is why I can't remember who said it yesterday. Someone on the stage yesterday talked about, you know, have celebrate successes, get a team, have a success, then show them to the rest of the organization. So people can be less afraid more. Just if I could add one other point, I think the other thing is, is thinking is educating the educating people where the gains from an individual perspective are gonna be there's productivity and doing work more effectively, which is, which is good, there's creativity, people producing different results. We see this in our, when we're starting to apply in our sales profession, they, they're getting different results and you know, in coming up with different shapes of things than they would have. Otherwise there's outcomes that they produce people boost, they can get more output, do more generative design in product design as an example that and then the final one, which is a surprising one is people like their work better when they're using generative A I, we're finding this in a number of scenarios where you're taking some of the drudgery and tension out of their work. And one of the things we're finding in a lot of use cases, people just like what they do. It's a great point. We have two questions over here. Why don't we take both questions? And then let Paul respond to both. OK. Hey, Paul VJ from U I on the Telco example that you spoke about the productivity lift. Did you advise the Telco on which um conversational A I product to use? Did the client of the Telco know which uh product to use? How, how did, how does the decision get formed? And you are the trusted advisor, how does that decision get formed? How much is the client know about Ja I and which product to get? And how do you shape that decision? A really important question? And part of that those five things I talked about what you know is, is, is in that digital core is, is needing to get into those decisions. I believe the the foundation models you select in the architecture you build is strategic and will you know dictate whether you're going to be successful? So in that case, in particular, some of their existing products, they had led to a, you know, pretty clear decision on which products were the right ones to build around in that case. But it's not always so obvious and you have to decide, do you do you use some, you know, from your company, the products that you have as an example, do you use something from uh your enterprise software companies SAP or uh or uh oracle or salesforce who are bringing out their own capabilities or do you use a model, uh you know, and build your own, you know, pre train or customize or prompt, engineer it. And in that case, is it going to be open source or proprietary? A lot of decisions to be made? And we believe these are, you know, senior level strategic decisions that uh that people need to be educated on because the wrong choices today will limit you going forward. And we're seeing is similar to the early days of cloud is proliferation where companies are going down a path that's gonna lead to proliferation of different models for different purposes connected to different data, producing inconsistent results all over the organization leading to the need for both uh dissatisfaction and a disenchantment with, with uh generative A I but also a lot of clean up work to be done. And you can head that off by taking the right approach. Paul, a lot of really great advice crammed in a very short period of time. Thank you so much for being with us and, and sharing those insights. Thanks Alan, thanks to all of you.