How AI Is Reshaping the Change Manager's Role
By: Declan Foster
Gartner estimates that by 2020, 85% of customer interactions with companies will happen without any human involvement. What image from popular culture comes to mind when you hear Artificial Intelligence (AI)? Do you picture the friendly, cute R2D2 droid, or do darker figures like HAL 9000 from 2001 or The Terminator spring to mind? Whatever your mental image, we can surely agree that AI is already here and will only grow more pervasive in the years ahead. When Netflix suggests a new boxset for you to watch, or when a robot in an Amazon warehouse picks the sweater you ordered online off a shelf, you are interacting with AI.
Employees are growing more and more anxious that AI could replace their jobs. A CNBC study suggests that up to 25% of jobs in the US are under threat from automation. Organisations are waking up to the importance of AI and to the possibility that their competitors could gain a competitive edge from it. A recent PwC survey found that two-thirds of CEOs regard AI as bigger than the internet revolution. Yet according to a KPMG survey, 45% of the executives polled say trusting AI systems is either challenging or very challenging. As a society we are so uneasy about AI that Andrew Yang, a 2020 Democratic US presidential candidate, is campaigning on a platform of universal basic income for all citizens, as a safety net in a world where automation and AI mean less work.
In my view, the Organisational Change Management (OCM) profession is well positioned to help organisations get ready for AI, and hopefully we can offer a balanced perspective on it. Thought leaders in this field, such as Professor Thomas Malone of MIT, have argued for a collective intelligence approach in which ‘people and computers can be connected so that collectively they act more intelligently than any one person, group, or computer has acted before”. That said, there are legitimate concerns that must be tackled, among them bias and the explainability of the algorithms used in Machine Learning.
This article aims to sketch out how AI might affect the OCM profession, and what role OCM can play in helping organisations adopt AI technologies. First, though, let’s define AI and unpack some of its components.
AI can be described as machines that act in ways mimicking human cognition to solve problems. Today its most common components are Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Robotics. ML draws on statistics, algorithms and large data sets to predict outcomes, whether that means judging from a scan whether a growth is cancerous or forecasting whether a loan application will default. The most widespread examples of NLP are arguably Alexa or the chatbots you may have met on the website of your utility company or bank. Self-driving vehicles are the most obvious robots we will encounter in public spaces.
What the Change Manager Does
So what is the Change Manager’s role, now and in future, when AI is introduced to organisations? On one level, introducing AI can be treated as a technology project, so the Change Manager will carry out the usual activities: impact and stakeholder assessments, a communications strategy and plan, and evaluating change readiness. Beyond that, the Change Manager will need to support the wider culture change effort, including education and general understanding of AI, and addressing worries about bias and fairness in ML algorithms. Explaining these algorithms will become ever more important. ‘Computer says no’ may be a great comedy catchphrase, but it is no way to explain an ML recommendation!
Treating AI as a Stakeholder
As if stakeholder management weren’t already challenging enough, we may now need to treat AI systems as stakeholders too. If, for instance, we regard our chatbots as digital employees, they may need to be informed whenever a major change is introduced into an organisation, rather than simply being seen as an impacted system. We will also be working with a wide range of new roles that AI brings about, such as Ethics Compliance Officer and Transparency Analyst. Savioke, a company supplying robots to hotels and restaurants, even employs someone with the job title Chief Robot Whisperer!
Using AI as a Tool
Could AI help the OCM professional do their job? What if, instead of a project email address, we used a chatbot to answer employees’ queries directly about our change initiative? Chatbots could also support change readiness surveys. A sentiment analysis tool could help us understand how stakeholders are responding to the change, internally and externally where relevant. Imagine using a Natural Language Generation tool, like those offered by companies such as Narrative Science and Automated Insights, to build narratives from all the data we gather on our change initiatives. We could automate a narrative-style report for our executives, based on the issues, risks, sentiment analysis, queries and change readiness data we have compiled.
Does this mean I am arguing that Change Managers are obsolete and should be automated? Not in the least. This is a prime example of how humans and machines working together can achieve far more than either could alone.
Bringing in AI tools can free us to focus on higher-value activities, such as meeting impacted stakeholders, walking the floor and spending more time engaging with sponsors and stakeholders. For my part, I am optimistic and excited about what AI has to offer.
Watch for Declan's next article on getting your organisation ready for AI.