The Two Faces of AI

 

I’m torn…My vocation entails teaching leaders how to solve complex problems both to protect the core business, and to ignite new Growth. My avocation is music - I’m a member of an international band comprising two grizzled veterans & brilliant young players from Europe’s best music schools. In both my vocation & avocation, AI is a blessing and a curse.

Which one will prevail?

AI and My Vocation

AI helps us protect the core business by enabling our management system and helping make problems visible. AI collects data, analyzes value streams, and helps predict hot spots. At the same time, I’m painfully aware that AI agents are shrinking entry level jobs. AI agents are good at core admin tasks & the basic research & analysis new team members used to do. Nowadays, getting that crucial first job is much harder.

Our new Growth work is focused largely on the consumer goods & financial services industries. AI agents enable our sprints. We can run many more experiments & harvest learning quicker.  AI agents also help us analyze & repurpose the existing assets. Years worth of social media content, for example, can be quickly analyzed & reused for new sprints.  We ‘fail fast, fail forward’ with breathless ease.  New assets can be developed & tested while we sleep.

As an engineer, I’m admire & celebrate the splendid engineering & continuous problem solving around neural networks the past twenty years.  Bravo!

I’m also aware that my fellow engineers & I lack the moral & philosophical chops to grapple with the biggest moral challenge of our age: How to deploy the AI genie so as to enhance our lives and reduce suffering while sustaining our core values?

AI and My Avocation

As a musician, I’m acutely aware of AI’s devasting effects on the creator economy. Musicians, writers, journalists, graphic designers, filmmakers and other creators have largely been obsolesced.  Tech companies ‘scrub’ everything they can find and thereby train their ML monsters.  Then they resell us AI slop at twenty bucks a month. Some say we are witnessing the greatest theft of IP in history,

I try to be a good mentor for our young players. One of my core messages is: “AI has destroyed the willingness to pay for creators’ work. We have to accept that hard fact & adapt.  How do we adapt? By becoming ambidextrous.  Develop a second capability that will put food on the table. Be a carpenter, electrician, engineer, teacher, lawyer etc. I do not want you to end up homeless.”

Our band does not use AI to create music – that is unthinkable. We play our instruments with our own hands, we will never use autotune or anything like it. But AI does reduce hassle in the studio. For example, AI can handle the tedious task of eliminating overly loud breathing between vocal phrases.  (I’m a loud breather…).

AI agents help us curate & repurpose our social media assets, as we do in my day job. I engaged a young engineer to develop an AI agent that selects potentially viral content, creates thumbnails & templates for the channels we’re targeting (e.g. YouTube, Instagram, TikTok). AI analyzes a given musical piece’s performance according to our key metrics (Streams, Click-through rate, average watch duration etc.).  Needless to say, I also use him in my day job.

In summary, AI is both a blessing and a curse - in my vocation and avocation.  No wonder I’m torn.

Best wishes,

Pascal Dennis         E: pascal.dennis@leansystems.org

First We Make the Tool – Then the Tool Makes Us

 

I paraphrases McLuhan paraphrasing Churchill. Both knew something about shaping human consciousness. Half a century ago we began an extraordinary experiment by making the personal computer widely available. With Agentic AI, we’re entering a new phase. What would McLuhan & Churchill say?

The Strange Case of Norway

In 2016, Norway gave every child in the country their own iPad or similar digital device. Today Norway is restricting and/or banning digital devices from primary schools. Their rationale: declining literacy & cognitive ability, distraction & reduced focus, and declining social & mental health.

Are we not running a version of Norway’s experiment in private & public organizations around the world? There are two hypothesis in play here:

1.     IF we provide our people with AI tools, THEN we’ll create value – smarter innovation, better processes, higher productivity & quality, happier team members & customers.

2.     IF we do not do this, THEN we’ll fall hopelessly behind.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

First we make the tool, then the tool makes us. How does AI make us? On the plus side, AI saves time & effort. In earlier blogs I’ve described how AI agents can free us from the tyranny of the ‘How,’ so we can concentrate on the ‘What.’  I’ve described how AI agents enable our innovation sprints, freeing us up to focus on the ideal product, service, and customer experience.

Will AI & AI agents degrade our ability to think & to create?

Will we see a repeat of Norway’s experience in our public & private organizations? AI is a boon to lazy, dishonest, and unimaginative. Why write, draw, compose, imagine something when you can steal it? We’re seeing AI’s devastating effect on creator economies. Will art & creative endeavour become extinct? It’s no longer an unimaginable question.

There are notorious Tech execs, for example, who boast about ‘gamifying’ music creation. Why play an instrument when you can scrape all the music ever created, pour it in into the gaping maw of your AI, and charge a monthly fee for access? ‘Making music is too hard,’ a Tech Socrates opined recently. ‘You have to learn an instrument & scales, and you have to practice. Our app makes it really easy.’ A similar process is unfolding for essays & other long-form writing, journalism, graphic arts, novels and short stories, and film.

Use It or Lose It

AI & AI agents can make us stupid. How to sustain our edge? Do it yourself – with the help of your AI assistant. Building on earlier articles, we must recognize that AI agents are akin to the big blue Genie in Disney’s Aladdin. They're capable of handling the ‘How’ but hopeless at the What & Why, which is where humans excel. In my view the centaur metaphor – human + machine – remains optimal.

Humans should therefore focus on the What & Why, which includes building alignment around a shared vision, and on deploying the plan to the front line. Humans must build the management system that enables fluid responses to emerging issues, and the front-line capability needed to continually solve problems.

We should engage our big blue Genies in the How, where they excel. And we must continually exercise our cognitive muscles by solving strategic management problems as they arise. The OpEx/Lean and Innovation fundamentals described in my blog, and books remain valid and essential. We just have an eccentric but highly capable new team member to help us.

Best wishes,

Pascal Dennis         E: pascal.dennis@leansystems.org

How Do We Win in an AI World? (Part 2)

 

Imagine we’re a large multinational, customer-facing company under intense competitive pressure. We’ve invested heavily in AI & there’s pressure to demonstrate a rapid ROI. Our team members, though loyal & capable, are hesitant to apply AI tools that might eliminate their jobs. What to do?

What’s In It for Them?

Job One is to answer the question: ‘What’s in it for them?’ Please refer to my earlier articles for my thoughts.

Some AI basics

1) AI can be a fine servant but is a dreadful master, 2) AI’s challenge is not unprecedented and mirrors the challenges posed by breakthrough technologies since the Industrial Revolution. In fact, the challenge is not so dissimilar to that posed by Robotic Process Automation (RPA) a decade or so ago in industries like Financial Services.  3) RPA is deterministic AI (If X, then Y) and excels at automating data entry, invoice processing, or high-volume, routine tasks. 4) Agentic AI is non-deterministic (If X, then Y or Z or maybe W) and excels at complex, cognitive tasks like customer support, strategic planning, or managing end-to-end IT operations. Agentic AI learns, which is disturbing to many.

So, let’s imagine we’re the company described above, and our goal is to improve both Customer & Employee Experience (CX & EX) in a critical customer-facing process, while reducing Lead Time & Cost. How do we proceed?

Overall Approach

1)    Begin every AI use case by clearly defining the problem. This is harder than it sounds. Too often, I hear problem statements like: “We need everybody to use AI this year so we can show the Board we’re getting a good ROI.”  Good luck with that.

2)    Lay a solid foundation by taking waste & variation out of the process. I remember our RPA partner telling me, “If you bring us garbage processes, you’ll spend a fortune & create garbage at the speed of light.” This also means levelling up your data. Is it high quality, complete & end-to-end? If not, fix it (with APIs, RPA & advanced analytics)

3)    Look for both analogue & Digital remedies for Value Stream & Customer Journey hot spots. Early on, analogue remedies will be most effective. Let’s say your goal is to reduce cycle time. Start with OpEx/Lean fundamentals like wringing out waste, addressing bottlenecks, level-loading, and creating extra capacity by cross-training.

4)    Agentic AI remedies come into their own after we fix our process & data gaps.

Key Enabler – Ambidexterity

Your Centre of Excellence (innovation support team) must become ambidextrous – in other words, adept at both OpEx/Lean & Digital remedies. In the age of AI, the ambidextrous win.

More to come.

Best wishes,

Pascal Dennis         E: pascal.dennis@leansystems.org

How Do We Win in an AI World? (Part 1)

 

Is the bloom off the AI rose?  AI optimism seems to be collapsing under a black wave of AI gloom.  To be sure, the effects of AI are everywhere, both good and bad, though the bad tends to grab the headlines. My practice is focused on improvement & innovation– both Digital & analogue.  What am I seeing & what does it mean?

Companies I work with are facing the following conundrum: How do we harness the power of AI while avoiding the jagged rocks dominating the headlines? The pushback against AI is real & growing.  People are rightly worried about their jobs, as industry after industry comes under attack. (And are humans not increasingly repelled, especially by AI in disguise, pretending to be human?)

Let’s imagine we are a large multinational customer-facing company. We have an honorable history of service to our communities, team members and shareholders. We’re under intense competitive pressure & are facing daunting Innovation, Lead Time & Cost challenges. Like so many of our peers, we’ve invested heavily in AI and know the Board expects a rapid ROI. And yet, our team members, though loyal & capable, are understandably hesitant to apply AI tools to improve productivity, reduce & otherwise improve our business. What to do?

AI’s challenge is not unprecedented. In fact, it reminds me of the challenge presented by Robotic Process Automation (RPA) a decade or so ago when it began to be applied at scale in industries like Financial Services. RPA is deterministic AI (If X, then Y) and has been used to automate data entry, invoice processing, and other high-volume, routine tasks. Agentic AI is non-deterministic (If X, then Y or maybe Z or maybe W) and excels at complex, cognitive tasks like customer support, strategic planning, or managing end-to-end IT operations. Unlike RPA, Agentic AI makes decisions based on your needs & the situation on the chessboard. Moreover, and this is perhaps what scares people most, Agentic AI learns through repetition. This is why chess programs like Leela and Alpha Zero continually get stronger, so much so, that human World Champions struggle to secure even a draw against them.

Many of the lessons we learned with RPA apply to Agentic AI. So, how do we win in our brave new world? Let’s begin with the most basic point: Agentic AI, like RPA, is a tool. As such, it can be an good servant but is a dreadful master. Let’s therefore, in every use case, define the problem we are trying to solve, and only then consider what tools might suit. As we’ll learn in coming articles, Agentic AI is rarely the first too you reach for.  Stay tuned.

Best wishes,

Pascal Dennis         E: pascal.dennis@leansystems.org