The Near Future Needs of Humans for Humans + AI

And how having a strategic point of view is the antidote for AI hegemony

There is a lot of talk about how companies will replace employees with AI. But I believe that unless companies develop a strategic point of view, the whole business model (i.e., the company itself) will be replace by AI.

In research we just completed for The Collaboratives it has become obvious that people’s expectations for gen AI have started to solidify. This is always an interesting time in the evolution of new human behavior. When a technology becomes widely adopted but is still new and changing people experience both excitement and apprehension. We saw this with the advent of the Internet, and then with digital mobility.

We are now at that juncture again. There is no doubt anymore that AI will permanently change human behavior. Advocates point to the power of AI to do things that humans once did, only better. Resistors fear that human to human interaction will disappear and regularly answer ‘NO’ on surveys designed to gauge whether or not a company can replace human customer support with something intelligent and automated.

Both advocates and resisters predict pain for employees. A recent article in Fortune about Anthropic (the people behind AI Claude) predicts that 50% of knowledge workers will lose their jobs to AI as companies will need fewer people to do the thinking that keeps a company going. Goodbye entry-level white-collar jobs, Anthropic says. Resisters read these articles and believe that something must be done.

And today in the New York Times, Kevin Roose reports on an AI start-up whose mission is not to augment human knowledge worker, but to completely replace them. Their time horizon is 10 to 20 years.

Meanwhile, students, writers, designers, and many other people continue to use AI. Someone wrote that Gen Z has shrugged off the doom scrolling and is learning how to co-profit from gen AI. (I can’t remember who wrote it, but then that somehow fits with the AI zeitgeist. I’m pretty sure I didn’t make it up.)

In the Stone Mantel survey I mentioned, we found that people are even more interested today in getting help from people than ever before. Take a look at these numbers. We asked people who had been shown new concepts that could positively affect their personal, professional, and family lives to choose between all intelligent-digital support, all human support, or a mix of both. After three years of asking the question, we are seeing the virtual elimination of interest in all-intelligent-digital support.

When people are shown new solutions that incorporate gen AI, they choose the solution that emphasizes guidance and support from humans. Not AI.

But here’s the real interesting thing about their answers. For most people, the ideal is a balanced mix of AI and human support. This is particularly true for customer support, but it’s even true for personal guidance solutions.

Despite the prognostications of the people at Anthropic (who, let’s admit, have a bias) people do not want humans to go away. And why should they? Anthropic’s Claude often hallucinates answers—making things up whole cloth. Over the weekend, I used Gemini thirty times. Twenty of the thirty times, its answers were wrong.

Advocates will argue that the tools will get better. No doubt they will but people will still want people in the mix. For a minute imagine what your work and personal life would look like without really smart people. Imagine that you can only ask professional questions to AI. What kinds of answers would you get?

The answer is you would get the ‘mean’ answer. Whatever is the most commonly acceptable, generically shaped answer would be the tool’s response. The same is true for AI art, for AI projections, and for AI automation. Not the best solution, the most common solution. Even if you tweak the AI to create something ‘original’ or ‘novel,’ the solution will always be the ‘mean’ answer. The middle of the road. That’s where AI will play.

As the world becomes more automated, the risk that companies face is the ‘mean’ answer, which will likely become the accepted hegemony. Hegemony is the dominance of one way of thinking or responding to a question. AI hegemony is the dominance of ‘mean’ thinking. And here is the threat that all businesses who use AI face:

The more dependent a company becomes on AI, the more predictable its solutions. The more predictable the solution, the less need the customer has for the company. Because: if they truly need a predictable solution, they will train the AI to do the work themselves.

Only Companies with a Point of View Survive

To those business leaders who are looking at AI as pure cost cutting/bottom line play, please remember that your customers don’t hire you because of your financial model. AI is the first technology that I can think of where both the customer and the company have equal access to the exact same capability. That means if you create something that is more or less what the customer can already get by using his or her own tools, you are out of business. If your company becomes predictable, your company will not survive.

We’ve established that customers want both people and AI. They want support from people who have AI superpowers. I’ve also argued that companies who rely solely on AI to do things are likely to create mediocre solutions and risk losing their value. Step one to surviving and thriving is ‘human + AI.’ But human + AI is still not enough for companies to survive, and for customers to thrive.

Step two is for companies to develop a strategic point of view about the near future needs of your customers. I have written an ebook on the purpose of having a strategic point of view. I’ve also written a chapter on Substack on the topic.

Unlike a mission statement or a vision, a strategic point of view describes what the customer will likely need in the near future. It can be updated. It grows out of real insights into human activity, and it influences the way a company deploys technology (as well as people, capital, and other capabilities).

Having a strategic point of view helps the company make decisions about solutioning, messaging, resources, partnering, and, of course, how to deploy technology. A strategic point of view informs the way a company creates its value propositions, customer journey, and segmentation.

It can also be the antidote for AI Hegemony. Instead of having AI determine the strategic answer on its own, the point of view helps the employees and the AI steer the solutioning toward an outcome that is unique and new. And without a solution that is unique and new, no business model will survive—certainly not in the age of artificial intelligence.