AI-mediated Business
An AI-mediated business will eventually be worse.
Businesses are falling all over themselves to breathe in more AI. Will we eventually choke on a gob we can't swallow? Or will we slowly saturate ourselves until what we've created is fast but soul-less. Integration of AI into business processes could very well end up looking like an AI-mediated business life. If AI interposes in the middle of many of our activities, I think the activities themselves and we will be worse for it.
Yesterday I chatted with a friend who said that he had started a business to help companies use AI to streamline their business processes. He had recently consulted with the owner of a business in law. The lawyer had told him about her current process. When a potential client comes in, she has an initial meeting, takes notes, hands those off to another person, who writes and sends an engagement letter to the client. My friend related that he had excitedly told her that he could use AI/automation in a number of those areas. I agree and see the opportunity. But I feel a hesitancy as well. Isn't it important that when the client comes to the lawyer, he knows that she is really listening to him? Isn't it important that she capture in notes what she, of her own training and judgement, feel is most important to his case? Isn't it important that the he knows that the letter he gets from her company was written by a human who understands him and proves it in the description of his case and potential approaches? If a robot listens, summarizes, writes and sends the message, the client might as well insert his credit card into a lawyer machine, speak into the microphone and then wait for the result to eventually be mailed to him from the robot court of law once his case has been completed.
Quality is going to diminish as one goes from real life -> to virtual life -> to AI-mediated life.
Progressively less humanity, interaction, participation. Less joy. Life becomes less of a lived experience and more of a flat digital effusion. Some broad activities of business that will be affected:
Team work
From sitting with your teammates, to video calling and chatting your teammates, to your teammates being robots.
Reviewing code
From talking with someone about design and implementation, to asynchronous fly-bys, to wondering what was generated instead of designed, to automated summaries, to automated merges.
Interviewing someone
From talking with a person at a whiteboard, to sending him a home coding assignment, to watching him AI-generate a solution.
Being interviewed
From meeting the team, to a series of video calls, to hiring managers-gone-TSA, directing you to put your hand in front of your face to determine you're not an AI imposter.
Writing an message
From caring enough to think it out and it write out in your own voice, to increasingly-terse digital text communication, to voice-activating an AI to write a letter for you.
Reading a mesage
From knowing that the sender cares enough to write, to even terser replies, to asking an AI to summarize a message that you suspect was written by another robot.
And on...
AI is here. It's presence is bigger than ever. There's a rush to embrace it and integrate it into every possible aspect of life, especially business life.
Business loves efficiencies. But letting AI define a process, relationship, event, or whatever activity, doesn't necessarily create a better version of that thing. I can see where it can easily be worse.
Nothing's perfect, so maybe the tradeoff's worth it? Present-day efficiency over just about everything else.