Cherish the Least AI-Like people in Your Company

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I am not going to opine--at the moment, anyway--about whether artificial intelligence will be the technology that finally lives up to the fears of the techno-pessimists, eliminating tens of millions of jobs and only creating a small percentage of those that have been hemorrhaged.

Or whether it will be the techno-liberator that frees us from the mundanity of mindless tasks, so we can live to the extent of our full creative genius.

Instead, what interests me has everything to do with the role that AI will play in transforming business culture. That's culture, as opposed to practices, where much of the focus is right now.

I believe the risks are high that AI will have a surprisingly destructive impact on the way businesses operate. My techno-fear is that what generative AI will functionally generate is a culture of perpetual mediocrity and agreeableness. I am seeing AI being used as a catalyst for group think, for eliminating objections and pushing to anodyne consensus--given that AI has the aura of speaking with unemotional authority and objectivity.

Agreeableness is the operative word.

I can see a clear path forward that leads to critical business functions like strategy, decision-making, communications, and organizational design becoming inoffensively gray and beige, a neutrality scourge that has gripped home furnishings and fashion.

Anybody who has spent any time with the LLMs knows exactly what I mean. If you ask them to provide a perspective on anything, what you will get back is an answer that sounds exactly like you'd hear from the most boring, inoffensively milquetoast person in a meeting.

That means a trite introductory paragraph, a sixth-grade-level summary of the pros and cons of the argument, and a wrap-up that reminds you to take both sides of the question into your analysis.