What have AI, Natural Language Programming and Machine Learning got to do with organisational culture?

Last week I went to see IBM to learn more about Watson, their famed AI system. It’s well-deserved fame, what their system can do is incredible. It reminded me of the first time I used an iPhone – do you remember what that felt like?

Seeing Watson in action got me thinking about how all this fits into and changes organisations and their culture. At the moment, no-one really knows the answer to that question. But for people wanting to build organisations that are designed for today and fit for the future, it’s a key consideration. Especially when you consider how machines are going to fundamentally change the job landscape, as the graph below from a study at Oxford University shows:

Figure 3. The distribution of bls 2010 occupational employment over the probability of computerisation, along with the share in low, medium and high probability categories. Note that the total area under all curves is equal to total us employment. (Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, 2013)

This isn’t something that’s going to happen in the future. It’s something that’s happening right now. But with very little out there about what’s happening inside organisations, we can only start speculating by looking at what’s happening on the outside.

At the moment, all the heat is around chatbots, programmes that sit within messaging apps like Facebook or Twitter and have conversations with people to help them with specific things. This means automating customer service and contact in an intelligent way. They’re not new; Radiohead made one 15 years ago. But signals from the bot community are that brands are piling into them right now, so expect to see a lot more of them over the coming months and years.

This is one to watch from an organisational culture perspective because customer service is the channel through which great culture translates into great experience, loyalty and word of mouth. Will customer service legends Zappos still stand out as much if it piles into chatbots too? Or will it’s hard-earned competitive advantage be ripped away as the technology of competitors becomes more sophisticated?

Clearly, clarity of brand is going to be key in the development of such bots. Copywriters drafting scripts, engineers defining response parameters, and the moment at which unusual customers are passed onto humans, all need to be considered through the lens of the brand.

Brand is the external expression of the internal culture. Brand being distinct from branding. The former is the image of you people have formed in their minds, based on every interaction, snippet of news, conversation in the pub and comment on social. Branding is the visualisation of what you want them to think of you. So we might expect organisations to start getting much clearer about what they stand for and how they articulate their brand going forward. Done well, the ripple effect of this clarity will be good for organisational culture.

Whether this investment is channelled into the application of this tech inside and organisation, is another question. One that will start to be answered in about 18 months if ADP launches its self-service HR chatbot o time. Anyone who’s worked in big organisation will welcome this type of automation with open arms – it’s much easier to ask a bot what the parental leave policy is instead of digging around a lacklustre intranet. You would expect that organisations committed to building and maintaining a great culture, would invest in making sure the human-machine interaction really strengthens the culture.

After all, language is one of the key mediums through which culture is communicated and shaped.

I’ll be continuing to explore how machines can help us better understand, articulate and observe and guide organisational culture. If you’re interested in that too, follow the blog and get in touch.That’s the question I’ll be exploring if you know anyone doing the same please let me know.

David Willans

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