Part 3 – Building Resiliency

Continued from Part 2 – Organizational Agility

If AI’s positive impact is to outweigh the many challenges and complexities, workplaces must be resilient. Upskilling employees, deploying ethical frameworks, and building a culture of continuous learning are critical components of organizational resiliency.

Continuous Learning

Continuous learning closes the AI skills gap by ensuring the organization is poised to future-proof their hiring, promoting, and training efforts to maintain industry and historical knowledge, the tacit understanding often lost in high-churn layoffs designed to find up-to-skills talent.

  • Provide learning technology for upskilling and reskilling efforts.
  • Champion a skills framework like SFIA to support today’s talent and prepare for the future.

Ethical AI Governance

Although Part 1, Transformational Crossroads, mentioned Ethical AI Governance, let’s go slightly deeper. Ethical AI focuses on policies and practices that employ transparency beyond the regulatory and compliance requirements. You want to exceed expectations, not just meet audits. Ethics require looking past compliance into stewardship and citizenship. How can you leverage experience while also protecting the privacy of your employees and consumers? How can you test and retest to eliminate bias and falsifications within your AI models? These are organizational considerations as you forge forward in your AI journey. Pay close attention to your AI governance:

  • Consider ethical and legal boundaries
  • Document every step in the process
  • Build transparency in your AI model about the data it collects
  • Build in accountability with employee and customer protection
  • Practice fairness by avoiding unintended biases or discriminatory outcomes
  • Protect the privacy and security of user data and track the ever-changing data protection laws.

 Empowering Employees

Viewing Gen AI or AI automation as a cost-cutting effort to reduce labour is a critical error companies make. Focus first on what you are trying to achieve in your business. How will incorporating Gen AI or AI automation contribute to the business outcomes? Take a systems approach to your solutions that considers the human qualities brought to the table and how those qualities can work with your plans. Empower your employees by aligning the technology with organizational outcomes and company values.

Empowering employees is simple, but it takes intentional effort:

  • Allow employees to make decisions at their knowledge level, trusting that they understand their roles and work.
  • Set clear expectations and define the behaviours you will and will not tolerate
  • Prioritize and invest in your people’s professional development by supporting continuous learning. This will increase the initiative’s potential and boost retention and productivity, leading to resilience.
  • Recognize and reward employees’ achievements before moving on to the next exciting project. Appreciation goes a long way toward building resilience.

Understand Potential Risks

Banking, insurance, software platforms, energy, retail, communications, healthcare, and other industries are all shifting, and those organizations need digital leaders capable of managing the risk of an over-reliance on AI. Some of those risks are company risks that boards and executives must invest in, including output auditing and tracking measures with human oversight.

  • Decision errors
  • Ethical breaches
  • Privacy violations
  • Market volatility
  • Hallucinating Gen AI models (making stuff up)
  • Weaponizing automation
  • Biased programming
  • Hidden surveillance

Governance is critical when implementing any AI solution, especially one that involves large language models, public communication solutions, and massive amounts of data processing.

AI Governance is less about mitigating known risks and more about identifying the unknown risks.

We are still in the early stages of widespread AI adoption. During this transition stage of balancing between the hype and reality, it’s critical to ensure you have a Digital Transformation Framework in place for your organization, develop a governance framework around your AI initiative, employ digital leaders capable of leading high-performance teams, and invest in upskilling and training the people with organizational tacit knowledge to help your organization move at the speed of business.

Contact Patti if you want to learn more about the critical role of Digital Leadership in future-proofing your organization.

Tag/s:Business Transformation, Future of Work, Organizational Change, Personal Development, Readiness,