3 Reasons AI will impact your business processes more than your staff

While ultimately, you will fire staff because of AI, that's the easy part!

AI is bringing uncertainty to the enterprise, a lot of which is focusing on the impact on the current staffing numbers and the mix needed when the technology becomes mainstream. However, while leaders must address that, there is a more significant impact on business processes. 

The design of Business Processes is for humans, not AI.

How humans work, their cadence and working patterns dictate your business processes.

The organisations' relatively inflexible size and skills limit the pace of execution. AI runs around the clock, and you can quickly spin up additional instances in the cloud on demand. Plus, if you're basing your models on a GPT, the underlying capability will evolve at an expedited rate over time. 

Today, your processes operate on a cadence based on human diary availability for collaboration, review and sign-off meetings. Compute power will operate 24/7 and doesn't need to search Outlook for a meeting slot, yet when AI works with humans, it will have to wait.

The size and complexity of your work have resulted in processes that broadly run in a series of linear steps. As the costs reduce, AI will have the capacity to run multiple scenarios and present the best solution, breaking the current doctrine.

How will your business processes need to be executed without the limitations humanity puts on them?

Business processes have an inherent lack of trust in those using them.

I see many processes in my role, helping organisations bring better products to market faster. The common premise is that teams need to be checked up on.

There appears to be an inbuilt assumption in most processes that the teams need to be checked up on while helping organisations bring better products to market faster.

This stems from several reasons:

• You don't trust your staff!

• You understand that to err is human.

• The slow pace of execution has reduced your risk tolerance.

They all manifest as reviews, sign-offs, approval chains and the like. When you adopt AI into your processes, will you trust it? How will you approve its work, considering its ability to execute much faster than humans?

Firing staff is easier than changing your business processes.

It's not enjoyable, and it's not fun, but reducing the workforce is relatively easy to do. However, making change happen in your organisation is challenging. People don't change easily. It is a good mix of human nature and the existential challenge to our belief system it can create - especially for those who have worked in a particular way for a long time.

Changing processes alongside retaining the knowledge that existed in the staff you're letting go of will be hard. The cost drivers pushing AI in the first place will likely result in a small investment to support the actual change.

Your biggest challenge will be transforming the organisation to run faster on less investment than before while aligning people, processes and AI.