If you invest more in AI than people, you’re doing it wrong

Generative AI has the power to reinvent every facet of an organization. Companies are realizing its potential, but before they can shift their gen AI strategies from “showing promise” to “making profit,” they’ll need to answer several technology-related questions: do I have the right LLM for my industry and function; is my data foundation rigorous enough to support it; do I have the right enterprise architecture in place to make the most of new or changing models?

These are tough yet not insurmountable technology challenges. But it’ll all be for nothing if organizations overlook the biggest factor in this unprecedented technological leap: their people.

When it comes to generative AI, invest more in your people than the technology.

In Accenture’s Technology Vision 2024 report, we explore how leading businesses have kick-started a race toward a new era of value and capability, and their strategies are underpinned by the common thread that technology is becoming more human.

This represents a vast range of new opportunities for companies such as unleashing greater human potential, productivity, and creativity while making products and organizations more accessible and diverse. What binds these opportunities together is gen AI, and to make the most of it, we need to turn our immediate attention to human capital.

The trust gap

GenAI is capable of reinventing the very nature of work, reshaping how businesses deliver value and better experiences for employees and customers. But there’s a trust gap between potential and reality. Accenture’s recent research on the nature of work in the age of gen AI says 95% of workers surveyed say they see value in working with gen AI, and 82% say they already have some understanding of the technology. However, their biggest concern is trusting their employer: 58% say gen AI is increasing their job insecurity and 57% need clarity on what this technology means for their careers.

For organizations, it’s crucial to begin with your existing workforce and demystify AI developments. Be transparent with your strategy, share examples of how gen AI amplifies human abilities, and emphasize how the benefits created by your organization will be used to invigorate training and development.

Start by carefully speaking with your people about gen AI. Yes, it can create more productivity and boost capacity, but companies can’t plug-and-play gen AI to improve their bottom line in the short term. The effectiveness of it hinges on engaged and thoughtful human input.

In the area of customer care, for example, many people’s roles are changing due to automation and gen AI. Since these types of employees spend the majority of their time talking to customers, they have rich language and communication skills and are adept at working with customers across numerous situations to find mutually agreeable solutions. Now they may find that their work increasingly involves channeling more online requests to chat bots.

Their experience and skills lend themselves to a new function: prompt engineering, the process of designing and refining text prompt inputs to improve the outputs of AI models. We’re even finding that former customer-service employees are often much better at working and interacting with LLMs than programmers. More accurate LLMs lead to more accurate gen AI solutions that have a positive impact on customer service and a company’s bottom line.

Despite this, Accenture’s Pulse of Change Survey shows that while 94% of the C-suite intends to increase technology investments this year, only 26% of that investment will be focused on workforce reskilling. In 2023, only 5% of enterprises trained their entire workforce to work with gen AI. We encourage companies to reinforce their own workforce with new skills that are integral to getting the most out of the technology. These figures demonstrate the urgency we face in workforce reskilling.

The diversity dividend

As our Tech Vision report points out, we’re seeing for the first time a generation of technology that’s more intuitive, both in design and its nature, which demonstrates more human-like intelligence that’s easy to integrate across every aspect of our lives. With these advances, companies need to ensure such tools are being created with responsible AI principles built in, working across governance, risk management, accountability and explainability.

So a diverse workforce is vital to help companies spot and correct LLM bias, hallucinations, and other unintended consequences that could affect trust and transparency. Companies that have already put D&I programs in place will be well-positioned to build an ethical AI framework that encourages responsible collaborative intelligence. This benefits a company’s productivity, while also going a long way toward ensuring the security and appropriate governance and compliance of gen AI solutions.

Build trust with security

Gen AI is a democratizing technology that’s rapidly enabling people across the enterprise to redefine business processes and workflows from the bottom up — faster than organizations can create formal programs. Consider the development of smartphones. It took a long time for enterprises to catch up to how and where people were using them, but eventually they realized that increasing employee mobility and the ability to work from anywhere could lead to improvements in productivity.

Accenture

This creates an interesting problem for companies to solve. People are so keen to use these tools, they’re using them in their personal lives and will expect similar tools in the workplace. But companies need to be vigilant about the ways they’re being used to ensure they’re not putting their enterprise or data at risk; when smartphone use was still in development, most organizations were slow to develop policies and supporting security standards. It’s a mistake we can’t afford to repeat.

With AI, there are entirely new threats that make protecting information and confidentiality very different tasks from what they were in the past. So enterprises will face the challenge of needing to act fast but with caution, all while knowing that competitors may not share the same concerns or impose the same guardrails.

The upside is that security in the age of AI represents an immediate and essential way to build trust between people and technology. Companies need to look at security as an enabler, not a restriction. Having strong security standards in place, with their value clearly communicated, may be the most effective way to build trust between a company and its customers, especially at a time of technological turbulence.

Companies are enthusiastically charging toward an AI future and, according to our research on the workforce, gen AI is poised to provide the most significant economic uplift and change to work since the agricultural and industrial revolutions. But on the road ahead, companies will find that the success of their AI strategy fundamentally rests with their people.