Designing a people-first AI strategy
An optimistic look beyond automation and copilots.
Writing this newsletter is where I do a lot of my learning, with you; I also learn by speaking with clients – which is why I’m delighted to share a topic which has landed well with audiences in recent weeks.
“Designing A People-First AI Strategy” is a talk based on a deceptively simple yet often-overlooked Big Idea – that the organisations who will win in the Age of AI will be those that remain focused on the basic human needs of their customers.
(See, I said it was simple! But if you want the bigger ‘narrative’ around this you can watch the first 10 minutes of this video)
And while this simple truth is resonating powerfully with leaders, the second half of the talk explores some of AI’s second order implications, illustrated with practical innovation case studies that bring the session to life and leave people feeling empowered rather than threatened by AI.
So, as well as AI Copilots (which is still the No.1 implication today), here are 3 further non-obvious, people-centred trends I’ve been sharing recently:
Note: It’s a fairly long read; in-person sessions are tailored to your industry and range from a fast-paced 20 minutes to deeper 2-hour discussions and workshops (and yes, we can get hands-on with AI tools ;)
To discuss your next meeting or event then please reach out directly to Renee Strom or check out my speaking site.
"One of the most impactful moments for me was Henry Coutinho-Mason’s presentation. His insights on harnessing the power of AI while keeping people at the center of the strategy resonated deeply with me."
Stephen McLaughlin, CEO, Prima Software
1. Augmented Empathy
One of the strange emerging properties of AI is that it is shattering many of our beliefs about where humans and computers excel. One reason why ChatGPT grabbed people’s imaginations so viscerally was because it displayed superhuman creative language abilities, an area where we assumed humans had the edge. Remember your first experiment with getting it to spit out rap lyrics, limericks, or Shakespearian sonnets…or a combination of all of them?!
Now another sacred cow – that humans’ unique capacity for empathy will be what sustains us in the Age of Algorithms – needs revisiting as we discover how AI is transforming how we connect with each other.
// So what?
Empathy is great. When it is present. Yet too many of our experiences today – in business, in public spaces, online – are defined by a complete lack of empathy. This lack of empathy is both painful and costly. Increasing empathy increases people’s happiness. In business, it improves customer experience (and loyalty). It improves employee satisfaction and reduces churn.
Fortunately, AI can help. There are a whole host of solutions such as Observe.ai and Uniphore which use AI to help monitor, analyse and increase the empathy levels of contact center workers. That’s an obvious area to deploy Augmented Empathy, so I won’t linger on it. Instead, here are three more non-obvious use cases to inspire you.
// Inspiration
Re:course’s digital humans increase diversity and empathy in healthcare training
Re:course trains doctors in clinical simulations with virtual patients, giving them a far richer and more practical experience without the cost and challenges of training on ‘real’ people. As the company explains, virtual training enables doctors to experience a more diverse range of patients, and its analytics are able to identify and alert doctors to any implicit biases.
Abridge’s AI-powered doctor’s notes
Abridge uses AI to transcribe and summarise doctor-patient conversations. One of its killer features is the ability to ‘translate’ complex medical details into non-technical, jargon-free notes. By freeing doctors from note-taking it allows for more empathetic, patient-focused interactions, while making notes more accessible helps patients better understand their healthcare and so increases compliance.
Activision: Call of Duty uses AI to stop hate speech.
The abuse of female gamers is so widespread that cosmetics brand Maybelline launched a campaign around it earlier this year. Now, the smash hit game Call of Duty has a new solution, ToxMod, a tool which uses AI to monitor its voice chat channels for hate speech and bullying. Players using harmful or discriminatory language are given real-time warnings, with penalties and bans if they continue to reoffend.
// Where next?
Choose your context. Augmented is the key word here. Not automated. Help people connect with people. Re:course’s training and Abridge’s doctor’s notes make your experience of visiting a human doctor better. They don’t replace human doctors.
Tread carefully. Mental healthtech app Koko tested using GPT-3 to write supportive messages for its users. The data showed people preferred them – right up until they found out they were written by an AI. As its CEO said, “simulated empathy feels weird, empty.”
New connections, new expectations? One example of how AI will unlock new connections is real time translation, which will enable new levels of empathy between people who don’t speak the same language. Yet when this is commonplace, those who take the time to learn another language will unlock even greater levels of empathy (well, until you say something offensive!). The universal human truth? We crave scarcity, and effort creates meaning.
What even is ‘empathy’? Sherry Turkle, professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has cautioned that, “what machines can score will become the definition of what empathy is.” My view? To echo Justice Potter’s famous quote about obscenity, when it comes to empathy (augmented or not), “we’ll know it when we feel it”
2. Measuring What Matters
In five years time, we’ll look back wistfully to when all the emails we received were written by actual humans. Imagine that – being nostalgic for today’s inbox?!
But we’ll also look back in horror at how ignorant we were about so many things. How little meaningful data we had about so much of our lives.
Focusing just on productivity and efficiency will blind you to one of AI’s most valuable superpowers – to do the things that humans can’t do. AI can turn the world into data we can’t capture and detect patterns and signals that we can’t see; it can then use these insights for our benefit. By measuring what matters, AI can keep us safe and healthy. It can boost our performance and wellbeing. And it can enable us to course correct before it is too late.
Caveat: there’s absolutely an alternative, dystopian version of this story. But Hollywood has told it hundreds of times. As business leaders, you have the power to create products and services that make life better – use the examples below as inspiration to do just that!
// Inspiration
AI May Be Able To Detect Early Alzheimer’s from Speech
Researchers at UT Southwestern’s O’Donnell Brain Institute have released a paper showing how AI can help detect early signals of Alzheimer’s in people’s speech, “even when it cannot be easily detected using standard cognitive assessments.” Voice recordings can also be captured in less than 10 minutes, while traditional neuropsychological tests typically take several hours to administer. Excitingly, similar studies have shown the ability to detect diabetes with just 10 seconds of speech.
SmartEye’s Drowsiness Detection for Buses and Trucks
Swedish startup Smart Eye’s system uses cameras and AI algorithms to monitor a driver's head movements, eye gaze, and facial expressions for early indicators of drowsiness, and if detected it alerts the driver to prevent dangerous fatigued driving. Soon we will marvel that we ever let vehicles on the road without these capabilities.
Beautiful Places aims to improve access to beautiful nature and design
I love an initiative that shows just how malleable an idea could be. You might expect ‘scenic-ness’ to be a nice-to-have, yet studies have found that living in beautiful locations has a more positive benefit on people’s wellbeing than the conventional ‘access to green space’ nature-based metric. Beautiful Places is a new initiative which uses AI to quantify and scale access to such places.
The damage caused by wildfires increased 10x in the last decade. Until now, fires needed to be manually reported – meaning it can be too late by the time firefighters get to them. Pano’s AI-enabled cameras can scan wide areas 24/7, despatching human crews to suspected fires sooner.
// Where next?
Full spectrum sensing. Computer vision and audio is just the start – the combination of sensors and AI means that we now have superhuman abilities to process, well, everything. Imagine there were no limits. What data and insights would you love to be able to access?
Regulation > Tech. These new advances raise some profound ethical questions. If your smartphone can alert you to future health conditions, should it? And who shoulders the liability if it doesn’t? Apple? Samsung? Google?
(Data) rich vs (data) poor. Aside from the potential to slip into an Orwellian surveillance society, an equally important issue is ensuring that it isn’t only the wealthy who benefit from these data-driven protections.
"I had the pleasure of speaking alongside Henry at an event for Private Equity investors and CEOs. Henry's speech was engaging and thought-provoking. He made the complex topic of AI and GPT relevant to the CEO audience through his stories and examples. Anyone looking for an accessible and entertaining speaker on what AI means for business today, should talk to Henry!"
Tugce Bulut, Founder & CEO, StreetBees
3. Crowd-powered creativity
Most people feel they aren’t creative. Ask adults to draw (or sing!) something and you’ll get a range of excuses. Ironically, often very creative ones… ;)
But AI is fundamentally changing people’s creative experiences. Drop in a rough sketch and it is transformed into a beautiful, high fidelity image in seconds. Jot down a few notes and you can get back a script for a TV ad, instantly. Hum a tune and it is automagically turned into a jingle.
Even people who think they ‘aren’t creative’, are now.
What’s really interesting about this is not just the output itself, but about how it changes people’s expectations. Suddenly a huge mental barrier has been removed. People can try things. The gap between ideas and reality has collapsed.
// So what?
Crowdsourcing isn’t a new trend by any stretch, but AI will breathe new life into it, as it lowers the time and effort required to contribute and improves people’s outputs (crucial for encouraging others to get onboard!).
Brands with large and engaged communities should be looking at creating new mechanisms or even new business models to tap into this (read more on how Grimes, Roblox and Coca Cola are tapping into Crowd-Powered Creativity here). Yet even organisations without public communities can tap into this trend via AI hackathons or innovation days.
One of the most quoted recent insights on AI is Ian Beacraft’s observation that, “AI won’t cause us to lose our jobs … instead we’ll lose our job descriptions.” Personally, I’m not convinced this will be true most of the time, because specialists using AI will be even better, and faster than generalists using AI. But there is one moment where enthusiastic and now radically more creatively empowered amateurs can have a hugely beneficial impact – and that’s in the innovation process.
Carve out a day, or better yet, a couple of days, and run a company wide AI-powered innovation sprint to experience how AI empowers and motivates people. If your last employee innovation initiative asked people to enter their ideas into a Google form, then the leap to seeing suggestions come to life with rich and realistic AI-generated product images, complete with professional-sounding press releases and detailed customer personas, is like the jump from black and white print to colour TV, or from simple text tweets to Instagram’s AR lens-enhanced Reels.
// Inspiration
Shell’s Sustainable and Affordable Energy Hackathon
You may well be deeply skeptical of Shell’s commitment to the energy transition, but you can’t question the energy (boom! 💥) shown by the 5,762 registrations and 9,400 submissions to its latest Shell.ai hackathon, focused on designing a sustainable and efficient agricultural waste collection network by predicting the waste generation potential in a given geography.
See also:
BlackRock’s HACK:BLK 2023 edition focused on ‘operational excellence’, with many teams using AI to improve productivity and efficiency.
Microsoft’s AI Classroom University Hackathon asks students to ‘reimagine the future of education’.
The UK’s Department of Education ran a hackathon exploring how AI could reduce teachers’ workloads by 5 hours each week. Don’t think this opportunity is limited to just corporates.
// Where next?
If you’re planning to run a hackathon, make sure to consider:
Where will you use AI tools? During the research and ideation phases? Using image generators to create product visuals? Writing mock launch press releases?
How will teams use these tools during the process? For newbies, can you offer some basic training both in how to use the tools and their risks (e.g. bias)? Or pair people with more experienced users?
What happens next? While the trigger for this is how AI enables people to be more creative, there’s a bigger shift at play – a shift in creative power towards front-line employees. Supporting and deploying people’s ideas will show that you’re serious about embracing this new reality.
Watch: 3 Non-Obvious Ideas To Design A People-First AI Strategy
The video of my recent keynote for Thrive Live at London’s Science Museum is now available. Attentive viewers will notice that I present different trends here. I told you each talk was customised ;)
And here’s what Cassie Gasson, Thrive’s CMO had to say about it:
“Henry was recommended to us by Secret Leaders Podcast host, Dan Murray, and he didn't disappoint! Despite the short notice due to a last-minute keynote dropout, Henry spent time on the phone with me the day before to perfectly understand our audience and tailor his talk to what L&D cares about. I'd definitely recommend Henry to anyone looking to deliver a session on a fresh take on AI and the future normal, we've had lots of follow up questions asking for slides post session too!”
Some other recent feedback:
“My go-to speaker for future-gazing grounded in reality is always Henry. He's a fantastic speaker who fills big rooms and gets high praise on feedback forms. It's refreshing to work with someone who puts so much time and effort into making a killer keynote that resonates with our audience and helps attendees to make sense of where the world is going – free from the BS and hype that's often prevalent in this space!”
Dan Brain, Founder, MAD//Fest
"The presentations were top-notch, but I was particularly blown away by Henry Coutinho-Mason and his insights on AI and human interaction."
Bob Boekma, MD, TFE.Agency
"The team left with a clear way to identify and seize the opportunities AI will present in the months ahead"
James Jackson, CEO, Bumper
“I booked Henry for the third time to give the opening keynote at our Future Hospitality Summit in Abu Dhabi. As always, he teed up the event perfectly and energised the room. The feedback was excellent – attendees appreciated that he opened their minds to what is happening in other sectors and how it relates to their industry. Henry is a dream to work with and really feels like a collaborator. I look forward to working together again with Henry for many years to come!”
Jennifer Pettinger-Haines, Managing Director Middle East, The Bench
Sound good? To discuss your next meeting or event then please reach out directly to Renee Strom or check out my speaking site.
Thanks for reading,
Awesome insights. https://www.clockwork.dk/
Love the insights. Agree, AI solutions will need focus on core human needs, and yet at the same time faked AI empathy can feel a bit empty. I still appreciate an LLM trying to be empathetic to me, even though I know it can't feel.