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00:00:01
Speaker 1: Here's the thing no one wants to admit about AI at work. The tech isn't the problem, It's the humans that are the difficult part. In this quick win episode, Dom Price, who spent twelve years as the work futurist at at Lassian, says that organizations are rolling out powerful AI tools but forgetting to upgrade the human system around them. At at Lassian, Dom spent years sitting inside boardrooms watching leaders throw millions at AI, only to leave their people overwhelmed, hesitant, or unsure what to do with the time they suddenly save. We unpack why saving time is meaningless if your people don't know what to do with it, and how a tiny mindset tweak can change everything.
00:00:56
Speaker 2: Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your day. I'm your host, Doctor Amantha Imber.
00:01:08
Speaker 1: How about the human side of actually helping the humans change? And it just their mindset? I know, we come across all sorts at Inventium, and I think, like, unlike other digital transformations, there's just there's so much more fear here. And you know it's legitimate as well.
00:01:30
Speaker 3: We've already been sensing this for a while, which is the nature of the change of AI is basically taking what used to be computer programming or intelligent technology work that was limited to people with software engineering degrees and saying, actually, now it's just humanly accessible by our knowledge workers. You're like, oh, that's a fundamental difference in accessibility. And here's the power of it. You don't need an operator, you don't need a person to roll it out or manage it or trait like. It's just there as ubiquitous and as you use it and gets more intelligent and you get more intaligy, like, okay, this has changed all the rules of the game. So essentially what I think has been happening for most of the last year and a half, boards, certainly in enterprises boards simile leaders have gone to their IT person and gone, it's another IT thing. How much do you need for this AI? And they're like forty mil And they go and buy a few tools and they roll them out and they're like, there you go, We've rolled them out. But no one, no one has upgraded the human system of how the organization actually works. And so they've given my mother in law a ferrari. Right, It's like it's not a good combination. She wants to toodle down the road, she wants to look around, she doesn't want to go fast. But you've given all these people who were just in this mire of work something super bowerful, but not enabled or activated them. The challenge I gave a CEO the other week was, I think you've invested heavily in technology systems integration, You've got the best of breed of all the things. I don't think you've invested outs heavily in your human system integration. The two are odds. And so once we've got on a whiteboard in person, right high fidelity on a whiteboard, we basically landed on a few things that made up
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their human operating system that needed an upgrade. And some of them were close. They needed a nudge or a tweak. Others he was like, that's probably five or ten years old. That's the way we've used to do it, so let's not upgrade that. Let's swap that out and find the new version. So I'm working with them as an advisory capacity to go, how do you build the best version of your organization. Don't go look at Spotify, don't go look at Google or meta. Don't go and copy anyone else. Be the best version of yourself and your industry for your people and your customers, and you'll be fine. You'll be relevant for it for a long time.
00:03:40
Speaker 1: What are some of the other big problems that you are seeing out there, like with the human side of these tech transformations to.
00:03:48
Speaker 3: The two really like quite funny human traits that I'm seeing kind of on repeat, and that's why I like them, Right, It's just it just shows the fragility of us as humans. Right. There's an organization I was working with early this year. They did that very clever ab test with their AI. Half their team's got AI, the other half didn't because they wanted to see the comparison. I love it, and the CEO is great. It's like, I want to know the real impact. If I roll it out to everyone, I'll never know the real impact. I'm like, now, ab test, go for it, so random side by side for a period of time. The vendor came back with a report that the team that was using AI was thirty five percent more productive. Right, So he rings me on a Friday afternoon. He's like, this is amazing. Right, it's performance review season. I'm going straight to the CEO, I straight to the board, thirty five percent productivity. I'm going to get my budget approved, roll this out. And I'm like, before you do, can you tell me or go and check, just double click where did that end up? Because I don't care what you saved. I care what you did with it. And he's like, good question. I'll come back to it on the Sunday Commy. He's like, not going to the CEO, not going to the board. So the team that had had the thirty five percent productivity improvement had a fifty percent increase in meetings, and when he asked them, he just wanted to speak to a few people. He's like, no, one's in trouble. What happened? And they're like, well, we saved the time. We didn't know the next best thing to do if you save me, if you go gone, here's this magic tool says you ten hours a week. I'm like, cool, what do I do with those ten hours? I've never had those ten hours before. You've never gifted me that much time, So what so we do the first thing in front of us. We're like, well, we'll meet, we'll have an intellectual joust, we'll make no decisions, We'll have a great debate, will take no minutes, so we do a lower cost think right, and so all the stats. Every time I'm on any portal LinkedIn wherever else and I see someone claim AI delivers x percent productivity, I genuinely do not care. I'm like, how did you reinvest? That? One goes? I can use AI to save time, so we all know it with a better mental health state, brilliant Like, I'd get behind that, but just saving time, I don't know what that even means.
00:05:47
Speaker 1: What stood out to me most here wasn't the productivity number that jomb shared. It was what happened after when teams save time but they don't know what to do with it, they sleep straight back into old habits. To the next time AI helps you get something done faster, take a moment before filling that space, ask yourself, what's the most valuable thing I can do with this time? That tiny pause can change the whole return you get from AI. And if you want to go deeper on this conversation, our full chat is linked to in the show notes.
00:06:24
Speaker 2: If you like today's show, make sure you get follow on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop how I work was recorded on the traditional land of the Warrangery people, part of the Cooler Nation