This month’s newsletter and blog topic is “The growing pressure on middle and upper management.” This pressure comes about from sweeping layoffs in the last year following the pandemic. The consequence has been major gaps in middle and upper management overburdening the remaining few.
In desperation, some believe that some empty roles may be filled by artificial intelligence. Is this a possibility?
AI Filling the Gap
Let us say that, within a company, a $250,000-per-year job was left vacant by layoffs. Could the company then invest that money in artificial intelligence and obtain efficient results?
As covered in earlier articles this month, the kind of people who were let go in the layoffs were skilled and competent producers and managers. So the question is, could a computer program be created to take that person’s place?
Let’s take a closer look at such a position. Any skilled manager has a decent understanding of people and is somewhat capable of relating to them at their level. They have extensive knowledge of a company’s products and services and can apply that knowledge—often when others cannot—to any given sales or customer service situation. They know their team members well enough to know who to assign to a particular task or project, and the best utilization of their skills. They also understand the executives above them, and generally know what expected and what kind of reports and information to provide them.
State of Artificial Intelligence
Great strides are indeed being made with artificial intelligence. It is being used for voiceover, content creation, the creation of artificial spokespeople, complex game strategy and more.
But could artificial intelligence, as it now stands, be used to replace a high performer or manager as described above? We can probably answer with a flat “no” simply because it has not yet been successfully accomplished. If it had, it would have been headline news, and companies worldwide would be diving in to implement it.
But let’s take a further look. In understanding the state of artificial intelligence today, let’s examine the AI that you and I frequently deal with—that of automated customer service operations. These are utilized by most large corporations today in their attempt to cut costs for hiring and training knowledgeable customer service representatives. We encounter AI customer service with phone service providers, television cable and subscription services, retailers and more.
Just search your memories of your own encounters with such automated operations or ask your friends and associates about them. Almost one for one, the reaction is total frustration. In nearly every case, the caller ends up pounding the “O” key on their phone or repeating “operator!” until they finally get through to a live human being. Needless to say, this kind of AI is certainly nowhere near management capability.
It Takes People to Deal With People
The answer is that laying out the extreme cost of trying to replace a highly capable manager or performer with AI is simply not worth the expensive risk. AI, as clever as it might be at playing chess or creating the blueprint for a building, is not up to successfully dealing with and handling people.
It will likely always be true that people do much better in caring for people. This is certainly true in complex high-end business-to-business sales and customer service (as many of us have experienced) and is undeniably true in management.
Let’s leave AI to the future and go with what we know works. The answer to our personnel problems is actual personnel, not circuitry.
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