No, technology won’t transform your business
Technology cannot empathise with customers, innovate for new ones, or dream on its own accord, argues James Legge of customer experience agency GHO Sydney.
In January 2019, rock icon Nick Cave was asked if artificial intelligence could ever write a good song. “AI could write a good song, but not a great one,” he replied. “It lacks the nerve.”
A few months earlier, Harvard Business Review found that while digital transformation was still the number one concern of CEOs and senior execs in 2018, some US$900bn had been wasted.
Organisations are clearly scrambling to innovate, but instead of investing in people, they’re investing in technology. The problem? Technology can’t empathise with people or create new ideas. That’s the human task.
https://twitter.com/mikefossey/status/1136409659638763520
Glad to see you typed up the notes from our fishing skirmishes mate! 😉
There will be those that say “yet” in response to your primary suppositions. You can ignore them because you’re right; we are so far from being able to achieve what most LinkedIn ‘influencer’ headlines and conference key notes claim. People still matter most. Tech is just a tool. A helpful one, but it’s not a solution in and of itself.
Computers don’t do well with subjectivity. They are great at helping us avoid our subjectivity being a problem, but when you need subjectivity… It’s too ethereal for them. Anyone disagreeing, write a program (on your own budgets – not Google’s) with the subtle intricacies of your ‘brand tone of voice’ or ‘mission’ as a primary variable for consideration when generating output… Let me know how you go with that.
Great article, if only more people would read and take this on-board. Having spent the last 30 years of my life in technology and IT, I get tired of the overselling of the technology marvel that will transform our business or lives. Sure there has been technology led transformation (the internet, mobility, eCommerce etc.) but all of these have required visionary business leaders (aka people) to make use to the new set of tools.
The primary issue I see is the point you make about technology being only a tool is not sexy and does not, in the eyes of the sales and marketing department, sell well to consumers. This leads to to what Gartner (in the aptly named ‘Hype Cycle’) calls the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’ which invariably leads to the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’ and very, very rarely to the ‘Slope of Enlightenment’ and finally the nirvana of the ‘Plateau of Productivity’.
The guilt does not all lie with the sales and marketing types either, Engineers and Technology professionals are notoriously bad at communicating or even understanding negative impacts of technology innovations – I am old enough to remember how the ‘Information Super-Highway’ was going to be the panacea to all that ails the human race, it would fix everything from greed and hunger to racism and exclusion – alas its just another place to sell more stuff.
C’mon James. Don’t leave us in suspense.
So did Mike Fossey go for the shaving razor or the soup subscription/
Taking up on Nick Cave’s point, I can’t wait for the day when all the AI algorithms have been optimised to the picometre. Just imagine it … all the algorithms creating exactly the same perfect song. I’ll take Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ instead.