8 min to read
How to find the balance between human workers and AI in your digital business?
Source: Unsplash.
Did you watch movies like Terminator or The Matrix?
Both of these share similar stories: machines become aware of their existence, and they start slaving humans, destruction is all over the city, and humans start to face their end.
Sounds terrific, isn't it? But does it have to be this way?
Nevertheless, we have to remember that these movies are just fiction, and in fact, there could be a way to coexist both AI and humans in the same workplace. Nowadays machines are achieving incredible things like winning a chess game to a human or discovering first than you what you'll buy on Amazon.
Sometimes, when we see this prowess that AI is capable of, we start to worry about our jobs thinking that these technological beings will leave us with no job, but there is a more positive view, and everything aims that future businesses will progress with AI/Human augmentation.
So relax, Terminator won't take your job, instead, let's find out how we can balance AI and human workers in our business.
First, let's answer...
What is AI/Human augmentation?
Computers have made our lives easier! Now, with just one Google search, you could find any information you wish. Back then, we had to look through a bunch of books to find the answers. Computers allow you to:
- Solve a problem
- Write lines of code to perform it
- Let it perform this task over and over
Now, with AI, machines can perform more complicated tasks taking a huge step in human decisions. Developers can use this technology to make a decision based on each problem by defining the scope of this allowing AI to perform the best solution for it.
When you mix human decisions with the capability of AI to perform tasks without an error, you find AI/Human augmentation.
Source: YouTube.
Best practices to balance AI and human touch in your business
Automation
What would the life of our community managers be without the existence of automation tools like Hootsuite?
They would probably suffer from daily anxiety hoping they don't forget to post at the best hours for each social media, or worse yet, post content from one of our clients to another's account. A grave mistake, probably there will be an email with two furious clients at any moment...
It's simple, humans - in our natural condition - are exposed to being distracted or forgetting things, it's what makes us one of our kind. That is why, thanks to automation, machines, and humans give each other a big brotherly hug since this symbiosis of work makes everything flow wonderfully on social networks. Everything is published as it should be published and has been created with human minds that have put all their creativity into it.
The idea is to get rid of your team tasks that can be repetitive, and therefore, they can be automated.
Source: YouTube.
Create a marketing plan
Let's put a hypothetical case. These are two marketing members from a mechanical engineering business talking:
- Member 1: Did you see that this digital agency is breaking it on TikTok?
- Member 2: Yes, their videos are awesome, we should be there too!
- Member 1: Don't you think we should study what is the best social media channel for our niche?
- Member 2: Absolutely not, dude! TikTok is trendy. It's obviously great for us!
Human beings... making clever predictions about trends at the moment.
We don't doubt that there should exist a niche for mechanical engineers on TikTok, but probably, a huge amount of users aren't looking at these topics on this social media.
In an article from The Niche Guru we find that the hottest niches in this platform are:
- Funny Dances
- Easy Dinner
- Dark Comedy
- Realistic Drawing
- Fitness Fashion
As you see, these marketing members didn't make a wise decision, which could cause a low return on investment and a bunch of mechanical videos with not too much engagement.
We could understand that looking through every niche article and video to find out the right channel for you may be exhausting and time-consuming, but, instead of wasting time on this, we use analytic tools to do the hard job for you by studying through keywords and other metrics which are the best platforms for your business.
Data analysis
Due to AI's nature, data analysis becomes more dynamic by letting computers calculate and generate all statistics while humans focus on analyzing more closely and making the best decisions for your company.
As we said before, machines don't come to take our jobs, instead, they could rely more on repetitive tasks, and beyond this, integrate big data and traditional methods to leverage the volume of richer and more actionable metrics for your company.
With this technology, you can reduce media waste by segmenting your audiences more effectively based on their similar characteristics. By traffic shaping, you will have valuable information on predicting the likelihood of future buying events.
Creative Process
Repetitive tasks take all the energy and creativity out of your team, they won't be able to innovate and think outside the box if they are only aware of measuring, creating, and publishing in an endless loop.
Instead, as a side effect of everything, when the machines take care of this, your creative and sales team will have more time to develop innovative ideas that make your company stand out from the rest.
AI is being able to provide significant help to creative processes such as music or architecture, so using it to your advantage will also help you get out of the typical publications that can already have your consumers bored.
Source: YouTube.
Hybrid customer service
Put yourself in your customer's shoes.
He has a problem buying in your e.commerce store, and a pop-up window does not allow him to access the product he wants. Stressed, he goes to chat with customer service, thinking that his problems will be solved entirely, but there is a detail, he is not talking to a human but to a chatbot.
No problem, chatbots are quite efficient in dealing with customers, but this machine is speechless with this customer's complaint because it has not been programmed for this.
Your client is desperate to talk to someone whose answers are not pre-written, he needs someone who understands him at his nature, but the chatbot has run out of coherent answers.
The customer gets frustrated and decides not to buy... Lost customer.
This would not happen if, at one point in the conversation, the chatbot redirects your client to one of its kind, a human who can assist them either by video call or chat to help them with all their problems.
Mixing these two in customer service is crucial to keep your customers' complaints or questions under control.
Smart Hiring
With the help of the Artificial Intelligence recruiting team can save time by scheduling time-consuming tasks like automating screening resumes, triggering assessments automatically, and scheduling interviews with all candidates.
Helps people focus
Once AI enters your workplace, it will remove the annoying day-to-day tasks that most of your workers don't like to do.
Similar to what we said in the creative aspect, when people spend less time in monotonous activities, they can perfect their roles in their areas focusing on what is important for the business.
Let's go back to the community manager example. Instead of wasting time publishing each post manually, they can use it more wisely to focus on studying audiences and how engaged they are with your content.
AI doesn't eliminate jobs. It creates more
As we circle the idea that machines are evil and will take our jobs, we should look into actual facts and find out that this inst the case.
Back in 1900, humans were scared that machines would leave them without a job, and almost 100 years after, we have seen jobs evolve, and humans still find their way to keep working.
If society suddenly stops consuming oil-based products and changes to nuclear plants - because it is in demand - this is a step forward for us as a society.
But what happened when machines started to work? Does everybody lose their job? No, instead, new mechanical jobs were needed to fix these machines.
And because life is a cycle, the same things happen when AI starts to need new jobs to operate like:
- Data Collectors
- Technical debt maintainers
- Model degradation
- Performance monitoring
- Software developers
Source: YouTube.
What is the right balance between AI and human workers?
The right balance, the ying, and the yang, how do you measure all these workers and tools to make the best out of your business?
Well, it may be not that simple because, in long term, everything depends on many variables.
The idea of taking AI into a business would be to make everything more agile and less bureaucratic, nevertheless, making it everything robotics and technology is not the solution at all, this is because human nature is still more flexible than AI when it comes to analyzing some aspects that get out of the spectrum.
Nevertheless, in a TED talk Sylvain Duranton, Global Leader of BCG GAMMA, an entity dedicated to AI, Data Science and Advanced Analytics applied to business, we found some lights on how to settle this debate among Humans VS AI.
We have been using technology to make our business less bureaucratic and more agile, that's because in bureaucratic models decisions can only be made by high representatives, putting too many obstacles for other members to move the buying or marketing process forward.
Bureaucracy is a little bit annoying but always needed to some degree. Beauracry offers a clear guide from the minds in the business to put guidelines over other teams, so the final result is as good as expected. But then sometimes, it gets lost among too many rules and steps.
When you use AI you program these machines to follow the rules, and with that, you avoid wasting time on repetitive or tracking tasks, but, as machines are programmed to follow rules, sometimes rules don't apply to a certain context.
Suppose, you had a severe case of COVID-19 and for a couple of weeks you looked for vitamins and other medicines to treat your case. Once you get out of this disease, you come back to look for the casual things you like to buy: shoes, clothes, video games, or anything funnier than medicines and vitamins.
But the algorithm keeps putting on top COVID medicines as the top suggestions, and you are seriously tired of it. What happened here? Well, the algorithm can't differentiate between situational purchases and the most common ones.
If you leave all the work in AI's software, cases are that these machines would follow the rules without getting the context out of it, making it more difficult for buyers to find what they want.
But let's get a closer look at this interesting TED talk and then we'll get some conclusions out of it.
Source: YouTube.
So, we thank Sylvain for giving us a more "scientifically accurate" look for this and found that balance for these two is:
10% Algorithm + 20% technolgy + 70% Humans/AI
As it happened with the industrial revolution, the idea is not to cancel AI and instead learn and teach our team members how to use it more efficiently so both can get the most out of it.
In Codedesign we have our proprietary tools, so we can get more consumer behavior for all our clients. With Codedesign Augmented Analytics our team of expert marketers can get a clearer view of what your company needs, achieving the perfect balance between AI tools and human professionals.
Let humans be the leaders!
Artificial intelligence could beat us at chess, but even so, we must make it clear that we are in charge: The human race!
Even so, after researching for this article, we understand that this is not a Human vs AI, instead, it should ideally be a Human WITH AI.
As a digital marketing agency, we keep up with current AI trends, but all this is accompanied by marketing professionals with all the knowledge to optimally activate all our clients' strategies.
If you are looking for an agency that scales your sales and brand awareness across all channels, contact us, and let's talk about your business!
Whether you are AI or Human, see you in the next article!
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Feel free to contact us to see the unprecedented growth of your business.
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