The re-jig of your job.
Wondering if everyone you talk to is starting to sound the same? Yes.
Wondering if the AI in your stack is making your decisions for you? Yes.
Wondering if your taste might be the last thing left that’s truly yours? Yes.
Good.
I am curious too, and I’ve been pondering this for you…. and here’s the thing.
A few months ago I wrote about The End of Your Taste. The slopfest in your feed. The drip tray of content versus the top shelf of human craft. The premium going through the roof of the human eye.
Turns out that was only half the story.
….
Recently, one of my Compadres told me something super interesting.
It’s a creative services business. Last quarter, the conversation came up about decommissioning the account management team.
Not fired. Redeployed.
They have built agents to do the paper-shuffling or what I call “the utility” side of an account manager’s job. The performance of every piece of creative, every campaign on every account, surfaces through a dashboard in real time. If something’s going wrong with the client account, an agent picks it up and flags it to the humans in the business before a client even notices.
Wouldn’t be the same across all businesses, but in this instance the old account manager role is gone.
The thinking is not to shrink the team. The agents created capacity for expansion. So it’s a sales problem, and the fine humans get redeployed into something that computers will find difficult to do as good as us perfectly imperfect, sometimes over-sensitive humanoids can do. Which is to nurture relationships, identify opportunities in the said or unsaid, and become chief opportunity officers.
Same pattern is playing out everywhere. Avi Goldfarb, an AI economist at the University of Toronto, puts it in one line.
“Automate the doctor’s diagnosis, superpower the (caring) nurse.”
The AI absorbs the tasks. The humans get promoted into what the AI can’t do. Be jovial, caring, lovely, messy, warm peoples!
….
A machine can do what I call utility tasks. Chasing confirmations.
But what an AI can’t do is build an emotional, intimate relationship and authentically and sincerely ask, “Has your husband got over the man flu yet?”
Imagine a robot coming up to you in a bar and offering to buy you a drink. It ain’t leading to a one-night stand or a marriage. A robot will give me a thrill that it can do that for a short time, but it will wear thin. Reminds me of a robo-like girlfriend I used to have. It didn’t last. See; would an AI write that?
….
What the brilliant founders are seeing is that taste isn’t just about creativity and strategy.
It’s about how you evolve your people to focus on the things they are great at and that they love doing. Which could be:
– Creativity
– Strategy
– Relationship development
– Idea development
– Product development
Not to say AI can’t do some of this…. to an extent.
Now that we don’t need to shuffle as many papers or send as many emails, it’s an amazing opportunity for us to develop into becoming better at being human.
The folks at Y Combinator, of all places, put it in exactly the same shape. Humans move to the edge of the company brain. To where reality lives. Novel situations. Ethical judgement. High-stakes moments. High-emotion moments. The things a data centre will never be inside.
….
According to neuroscientist and author Dr. Tara Swart, we’ve identified approximately 34 different senses in the human body.
If we just focus on three:
– The head
– The heart
– The guts (i.e., trust your guts)
It’s the human body that can hear and feel what another person is really saying.
There’s research behind this too. Albert Mehrabian’s work at UCLA, later picked up in Lisa Earle McLeod’s Noble Purpose, found that when what someone says and how they say it don’t match, trust breaks down like this:
– 55% body language
– 38% tone of voice
– 7% the actual words
Which is where the “93% of trust is non-verbal” line comes from.
Play that out and you land roughly where I’ve always put it…. 10% of communication comes through text, the rest through voice, and 100% face to face.
As I always say, “The noise of the world is made up of its silences. What’s in the unsaid. What is a client not saying?”
You need taste to spot the opportunity that a spreadsheet can’t see. That said, big data might spot the anomaly. But you need creativity to imagine it into something brilliant.
Taste is knowing.
….
The AI absorbs the taste-less work.
The humans keep the taste-rich work.
Goldfarb again, this time in cold numbers. If your job is 75% exposed to AI, you spend your time on the remaining 25%. And that 25% is where the market pays more, not less.
That’s the re-jig of your job.
….
So here’s the question.
When the machines take the paperwork, where do your people go?
If you redeploy them toward the taste-rich work, the relationships, the judgement, the business development, the human calls, you win.
If you try to replace them with defaults, you become one.
