AI: What is Futurecasting, and Why Should I Do It? Part 2

AI Landscapes: Redefining Commerce, Careers, and Communities - Article 2 of 8

Diagnosis involves understanding the roles across your organization with significant staff levels, the work they do today, and the state of current job descriptions. We recommend starting with a handful of high-impact roles, as this will minimize the lift while still providing significant impact.

With the roles identified, the next step is to develop an understanding of the work that is performed. There are many ways to do this, but we’ll share our approach. Our organizational effectiveness technology partner, REWORC , provides an excellent overview of crowdsourced data from your staff regarding where they spend their time, how collaborative and complex the activities are, and how value-additive they are. The below graphic provides all this data in two visualizations:
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With pilot roles selected and data on their work activity compiled, you’re ready for the fun part - Futurecasting.

Involve staff in the roles today in a series of workshops that show AI as it is used today. A simple web search will provide you with industry or functional AI solutions that can be used to share possibilities. Ask the team about their pain points and low-value activities (indicated by brown in the image above). What ideas do actual use cases generate? What risks do they see, and what other value-added activities could replace what might be automated, assisted, or accelerated?

In one example, we estimated that out of three roles, AI impacts ranged from 36%-200% improvement in the ability of roles to increase throughput of work. The effects of AI solutions won’t be the same for each role – different impacts and opportunities will emerge through this process. You – and your staff – will start to see what’s possible. Some companies will want to embrace AI solutions widely, and others less so. The only wrong answer at this stage is to not engage staff in a role-level conversation about what could be possible.

This series will explore four steps we believe you should be taking – now.

Diagnose and Futurecast: AI isn’t coming. It’s here. Involve your staff – especially those in roles with a lot of human capital – in assessing use cases to boost their knowledge of what is possible and demystify the nature of the change. We now know enough to futurecast roles and understand what they will look like in an AI-enabled world. We can be precisely wrong but directionally accurate about the next five years to develop a plan for how our workforce will change.

Reskilling Human Capital: This country has never experienced a technological shift against a declining labor force. Add to this that AI-experienced resources you might want to acquire will be limited and in very high demand. Just like back in Y2K, hiring your way out of this change will be hard. We must embrace a skills-based understanding of future roles and alternative paths for impacted people.

Content, Education, and Change Management: Change management was huge in the 1990s, and it’s time this discipline came back into fashion. We’ll discuss why acting to control the narrative is crucial and share some ways to do this effectively.

Reimagined Operating Models: All past disruption winners could reimagine a product or service leveraging technology to change the dominant operating model of the day. Uber & Lyft with taxis and Netflix with video streaming are great examples of changed operating models equating to success. We’ll explore how this can be done in a way that reduces risk and can provide speedy returns.

Over this series of eight articles, we’ll touch on all these paths of success to prepare you, your business and the evolving impact AI will have on the workforce. Thanks for reading. Let’s talk AI implementation. Send me a note at wade@batonglobal.com.

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About Wade Britt‍

Wade Hampton Britt, IV is a partner and the Managing Director at Bâton Global. He has lived and worked in a dozen countries in the global express and edtech sectors before joining Bâton Global in 2016. Wade is passionate about helping clients and their communities navigate the AI disruption better than previous technological changes.