How AI Could Bring More Joy to the Workplace

Most conversations about artificial intelligence eventually return to the same concerns: is it going to replace my job, disrupt, and create an uncertain future? But what if we are looking at AI through the wrong lens?

On the latest episode of Tech Transformed, host Trisha Pillay sits down with Kevin Surace, an author, AI expert and technology pioneer who has spent three decades working on technologies that helped lay the foundations for products such as Siri and Alexa. His perspective is very different from the usual debate. Rather than viewing AI primarily as a threat to human work, Surace sees it as a tool that can expand what people are capable of achieving.

This shift changes the conversation from what AI might replace to what it could make possible. The discussion explores how AI can help people work faster, tackle problems that were previously out of reach and spend more time on areas where human judgment, creativity and experience still matter. For Surace, the question is not whether AI will change the way we work. That change is already happening. The more important question is what we choose to do with the capabilities it puts in our hands.

Surace holds 95 patents and is often credited as the father of the AI assistant. His work goes back to General Magic, an early-1990s Apple spinout where his team built the first digital agents and a programming language called Telescript. That early assistant technology had millions of users well before anyone was talking about chatbots.

His upcoming book, The Joy Success Cycle, grew out of a question people kept asking him: Why does he seem to enjoy his work so much? The answer, he told Pillay, comes down to sequencing. Most people wait for success before they let themselves feel joy. Surace argues it works the other way. Joy has to come first, and success follows from it.

Surace's favourite example is presentations. He used to spend a full week getting slides right, not because the ideas took that long to develop, but because formatting, alignment, and design details ate up all his time. Now he outlines what he wants to say, hands it to an AI tool, and gets a polished deck back within the hour.

The lesson he draws from that isn't about speed for its own sake. It's about separating the parts of a job that actually bring satisfaction from the parts that never did. Moving a font two pixels to the left never gave anyone joy, he says. Delivering an idea to a room full of people can. AI, in his view, quietly removes the first category and leaves more room for the second.

Surace pushed back hard on the idea that AI shrinks the job market. He pointed to every major shift he's lived through from the PC, email, the smartphone, and the internet. Each one triggered the same fear, and each one ended up creating more roles than it eliminated.

He sees the same pattern playing out with software development right now. Coders using AI tools are shipping features and fixing bugs far faster than before, and instead of trimming teams, many companies are hiring more developers to keep pace with the new demand their own speed has created. The job itself has changed. Writing code line by line matters less than guiding the output and checking it. But the need for people hasn't gone away.

One point Surace kept returning to was how companies get AI wrong when they try to automate their existing process instead of questioning why that process exists in the first place. He used car insurance claims as an example. The old approach sends an inspector to look at damage, fills out paperwork, and routes it through several people before a check gets issued. An AI-first approach skips most of that. A customer photographs the damage, uploads it, and a payment can go out the same day. This kind of redesign, he argues, is where the real gains sit. Businesses that only bolt AI onto old workflows will see modest improvements. Businesses willing to rebuild the workflow from scratch stand to cut costs dramatically and outpace competitors who don't.

The conversation also turned to security, an area where Surace runs a company building biometric authentication devices. He explained that attackers rarely bother breaking into networks directly anymore, since most data sits encrypted. Instead, they use AI to generate convincing phishing emails and fake login pages designed to trick people into handing over multi-factor authentication codes. Surace believes fingerprint-based verification is where things are headed, since voices and faces can now be convincingly faked, but a fingerprint can't. He expects verified-identity badges to become common online within the next few years, giving people a way to confirm they're actually talking to the person they think they are.

When asked what businesses should do now, Surace's advice was simple: get every employee using AI tools regularly, not occasionally. He compared it to the early days of the PC, when companies had to run training sessions just to get staff comfortable with word processors and spreadsheets. Adoption took time, but the alternative was falling behind. He sees AI the same way. Leaders who wait for their teams to come around on their own risk losing ground to competitors who move faster. If you would like to learn more, visit Kevin Surace's website or follow him on Linkedln.

• AI removes repetitive work so people can focus on higher-value tasks.
• Joy drives success in the AI era.
• AI will create new jobs by accelerating innovation.
• An AI-first culture is key to staying competitive.
• Biometric security will help counter AI-powered fraud

00:00 Introduction to Kevin Surace and AI's Potential

01:52 Kevin's Journey and the Joy Success Cycle

04:14 AI as a Joy Maker in Daily Work

06:07 The Cycle: Joy Leads to Success

07:39 AI's Opportunity for Increased Jobs

12:15 Is AI a Technology Cycle or a Transformation?

13:50 The Ubiquity of Smartphones and AI's Role

14:39 Workforce Transformation and AI Adoption

23:06 Cybersecurity Challenges in the AI Era

26:55 Advice for CEOs and Leaders in an AI World