The interplay between AI and human intelligence offers both challenges and opportunities, heralding a future where adaptability and innovation are key

The foundation of understanding an organisation lies in understanding the role relationships within it. An individual may even, lose their identity in living up to the requirements of his organisational role. Illustratively, the President of an organisation is no longer just an individual who occupies that position. The person who occupies that position becomes the President of the organisation with the President’s characteristics, the President’s traits, and the President’s attributes.

Being a true President may often require his acting in denial of his inclinations in favour of the role requirement. This issue has usually constituted the foundation of organisation analysis and operations. The theoretical basis of this thinking was laid out in 1952 by Elliott Jaques in his classical book “Changing Culture of a Factory." This was a report of 1948 and 1950 of a Glacier Metal Company, London. The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations was the sponsor.

The significance of the book lies, among other things, in the theoretical and operational implications of the research findings. The study went back to 1938. That is another story. Since then, few things have so fundamentally affected organisations understanding till the coming of artificial intelligence (AI). These are indeed seminal times in terms of understanding organisations. AI has affected how one looks at manufacturing, finance, logistics, and more. The expressions of job design have changed. If the basis of job design has changed, the understanding of organizational structure stands to change. 

The key issue is whether the fundamental changes through the new model of business products for increasing profit have impacted organisational operations. And how they have affected pricing, job market changes, and created or altered new revenue streams. Currently, the world of products and academia is dealing with a lot of jargonise. The popular references are two models, one is the platform-based model, other is the subscription model.

There may be several others but are yet to acquire significance. Many of them who would survive, would get modified, and much of them would evolve into something totally different. Time can tell. For the present, efforts are being made to understand business models and their impact on work conduct. An obvious outcome of AI is the redundancy of many tasks. As the character of tasks changes, the character of organizational models is open to change.

The whole approach of aggregation of organizational tasks into job designs has undergone a fundamental change. Many humanly rendered tasks have become redundant, and they have then been replaced either by machines or machine-led aggregation of skills. This whole process is akin to a major revolution in the understanding of the work. It needs to be realized that once such forces are generated, there is no reversal that can take place in its entirety. It also impacts job designs, which for whatever reason may not change.  Put simply, the nature of the task itself has revolutionized organizations. Practically everyone needs to understand AI because there is nothing that can be quite untouched by that process. The overlapping jobs would disappear, skill shifts would take place, and reskilling and upskilling would become the order of the day as never before. When such fundamental changes are let loose, job displacement is not just job displacement but the seedbed of new forms of job creation. The interesting thing is that AI acquires some human characteristics that are still in the domain of documentation, understanding, and interpretation. The bias in AI would have been the act of abbreviation and one might say, even the dispensation of organization fair play. Privacy and security are concepts that change, and nothing stays quite what it was even a quarter of a century ago. 

The upshot of all these is the creation of a paradigm of organization management, whether the top management may not be necessary at the top but acquire primacy even while imbibed in the heart of an organization. This would happen because of the ability of the AI specialist to affect the nature of the work itself. The chances are clear that AI as a service is on the way to acquiring a character of its own. For some AI will be the first language, and they will affect the running of the organization in a very critical manner. For the rest, AI would be a second language, and everyone would need to understand a little bit of the nature of AI. 

Put simply, the future of work will be a diligent factor in many ways, which might be an outcome of the revolution of AI. The fascinating thing is to observe how the character of AI affects other functions of the organization like finance, marketing, the functioning of ports, and more. The above is not to say that pathways are clear and the shift in organisational nature is irrevocable. The AI is a job in progress. It’s a work in progress that is still taking shape and a character that remains in service of organization management, will only gradually become clear. How this will roll out is difficult to predict, but one thing is clear:

AI is here to stay. All in all, it will be interesting to observe how AI and human intelligence deal with each other and create an amalgam of human efforts for organizational growth. The future is here, and over time, it will take shape with better clarity and hopefully some predictability.

(The writer is a well-known management consultant of international repute. The views expressed are personal)