Detail of David and Goliath from The Gates of Paradise by Ghiberti: Florence Baptistry
Christopher J. Fernandez, Corporate VP of Human Resources at Microsoft’s recent post on LinkedIn, From one to many: AI agents and the hyperscale of human thought is the most insightful piece I’ve read on what executives should do about the coming mash up of digital and human workers. It makes sense to me that his insights are useful because Microsoft is living at least 24-48 months into the future compared to most organizations when it comes to AI adoption and scaled use. Given that AI is moving faster than dog years, thats a big lead in experience.
Talent is a Continuum of Human and Digital Workers
The first useful insight is that we are working with what he calls a Total Talent Continuum. Continuity of expertise and decision rights is a practical way to think about the problem. Digital workers can help retrieve things, help do a task, or perform a task or set of tasks – a continuum of agency. The human talent can teach itself how to use the tools, and one of the coolest things is that generative AI can not only translate languages but it can translate domains of knowledge and levels of expertise. Everyone is a novice in something and AI can act as a bridge between the experts in one area and novices in another. This translation function unlocks so much energy and value because so many of an organization’s areas for reinvention and innovation sit at the nexus of different functions or domains. We saw this in our research we wrote about in Staple Yourself to an Order in HBR many years ago. AI can help en-skill talent to bridge those gaps to create customer value with both digital and human workers.
The Birth of a Cognitive Guild: Tool Building As Part of Mastery
Guilds held enormous power in Europe in the 14-16th centuries. In Florence, the Arte di Calimala (Guild of the Finished Cloth) commissioned Ghiberti’s famed Gates of Paradise on the Florentine Baptistry at the foot of the grand cathedral. Every master craftsman had their own tools – often specialized and always prized possessions handed down from generation to generation. Likewise, generative AI is enabling experts to build their own cognitive tools. Microsoft is creating environments where people are inspired to create these tools and share them with the organization. This ability to change the liquidity and scaling of knowledge will have profound implications on organizations because the marginal cost of creation and sharing is much lower. Skeptics can try one of the deep research tools as one begins a project on any topic and thereby will see that in less than 30 minutes any individual can begin with a higher level base of expertise than ever before. The quality of an employee’s citizen development chops is becoming part of the evaluation process.
Transforming From a Bureaucracy to A Knowledge Garden
Napoleon Bonaparte was as capable a designer of modern bureaucracies as he was a warrior. His renovation of the regal French civil service was centered, in the main, on competence not inheritance. (Napoleon’s record in this regard was not without blemish as he had his nepotistic weaknesses too.) In the modern enterprise, the famed sociologist Max Weber noted that the key features of bureaucracy are: hierarchy, rule creation, rational and impersonal tone, and, often, centralization. Microsoft’s use of AI is more organic than bureaucratic and enables the creation and sharing of knowledge and authority in a more natural form. Expertise can be codified and shared by citizen programmers who are empowered. The right analogy for this new ecosystem is not the Parisienne office building filled with administrators, but rather an English garden flowering with variety and alive with species. Just as the great English landscape designers guided beautiful creations with a judicious shaping of the environment but not too much control, Microsoft too is encouraging the flourishing of citizen programmers creating and sharing their knowledge in agents across the organization.
The great challenge for leaders of these hybrid organizations will be to harness the enormous power of digital workers not only to automate many tasks – which it will do — but also to encourage the growth of a new cognitive guild that can create and share new tools and teachers that reinvigorate value creating processes. Executives should note that Microsoft is a fertile garden to “visit” and discover design ideas for their own organizational knowledge landscape.
(For the curious reader, see my two earlier articles on this topic: 3 Reasons to Consider AI Agents for Your Organization and Your Next Co-Worker is Going To Be a Robot.)
