In the early days of artificial intelligence, its use was limited to government and defence sectors. But now, AI is rapidly making its way into industries and businesses to resolve the problems of cost, profitability and sustainability. How are businesses collaborating with AI to boost productivity?

Some of the leading Indian companies – such as OYO, Swiggy, Tech Mahindra and Tata Technologies – are readily integrating AI into their processes. Companies like Google and Microsoft are using AI to develop new products, while others are using this technology for process optimisation, workflow efficiency, and predictive analysis. Netflix and Amazon are also using AI to application screening and customer-care solutions. The fusion of human ingenuity and AI capabilities is evident in sectors like automobiles, hospitality, law, medicine, finance and banking.

The contribution of AI across industries and organisations has been undeniable.Their support in bringing development and growth across society cannot beunderstated. The World Economic Forum shares how AI can contribute to thebenefits of people, planet and performance. In a detailed expert analysis, it was found that AI positively contributes to SDG goals.

Way forward

These are early days of human-AI collaboration. Therefore, researchers have proposed some changes in the work design and division of labour to produce greater trust and clarity of role for humans as they collaborate with AI.

Building Trust: For any technology to be accepted, trust plays a critical role. The trust between humans and AI cannot be assumed to be linear. Besides, it takes time to develop trust, more so when the technology is dynamic and continuously evolving. So, a more focused approach is needed to educate users on AI capability and its impact on future jobs to boost trust in the technology.

Work Design: While AI has started gaining acceptance in organisations, organisations should strive to adopt AI in a way that humans see it as less of a threat to their jobs. One way of doing it is to let the final decision be made by humans. Take the banking industry as an example. Wealth managers can take inputs from AI and propose wealth management plans to their clients. This is one of the most common work designs that makes use of AI as an expert and lets humans decide how to use its output.

Division of Labour: With the insight on how the workflow can be best designed to produce trust, another important contributor to this collaboration is the division of labour. Humans need to understand how work is divided between them and AI, what their role is and how tasks are divided amongst them. This clarity in role also adds to the greater acceptance of this collaborative setup.

Strangely enough, many organisations introduce AI to do a task for which humans may already exist, to assess its competence against existing employees. This should clearly be avoided.

Creating a clear division of work between humans and AI can help create clarity for humans of their roles in tasks they have. Having humans play to their strengths and contribute as experts on the task helps create security for humans as they are not second-guessing what the AI is doing. There is greater acceptance of AI as they are placed as teammates to humans than tools in the workplace.

Systems Understanding: Having two systems, humans and AI, work together on different aspects of the task increases the efficiency of the system. For example: while screening a job application the AI can use various tools and filters and shortlist the candidates. Humans can evaluate the shortlisted candidates through interviews. Another such collaboration can be in the development of a report, AI can focus on analysing the quantitative aspects, while humans focus on qualitative aspects, thus creating a collaborative outcome on the report.

Management and leadership should create a conducive environment, which can help employees better accept AI. They should also sensitise, train and bring clarity on the role and their vision for including technology in the business processes.

(Ruchika Mehra Jain is a scholar with an interest in human and algorithm interface and visiting faculty at IILM, Lodhi Road. Views expressed are personal)