From where we stand today our AI-shaped future looks volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous! We need to quickly bend our minds around this reality.

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Sep 26, 2023

Speaking at a conference last week we asked the audience whether AI made anybody feel slightly uncomfortable. Three, maybe four, hands went up. And for clarity, if we had been in the audience, we would have had both hands up in the air straight away. A little later we asked the audience to consider the same conference in 10 years’ time … what percentage of the seats would be vacant because AI had replaced people in the industry. A few hands went up for ‘less than 10%’, the vast majority picked ‘up to 50%’ and a single true pessimist went for ‘more than 50%’.

It was interesting that although the vast majority felt that up to 50% of the jobs in their industry may be lost, only 3 or 4 people were uncomfortable at the prospect. So on the face of it ‘the person next to us is for the ‘chop’ and we’ll be fine’ seems to be the attitude. The word ‘decimate’ comes from the Latin word decimatus, which meant the "the removal or destruction of one-tenth" … (supposedly as a military punishment the Roman army would line up an offending cohort of soldiers and kill every tenth man). The Romans didn’t have a word for the removal or destruction of one-half!

To be completely candid, we knew before we started to speak that most people would select the middle option (‘up to 50%’). Our own research suggests that the arrival of AI is such a massive event that people are finding it difficult to understand its impact (it is outside their frame of reference) and so most people were going to select the middle ground … hedging their bets.

“Your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be forced to surrender many things that you now scarcely know you have” Author: James Baldwin

Going back to our lone pessimist … his view was that the vast majority of people do not have the interest or ability to learn the sorts of new skills and capabilities that will be necessary in an industry shaped by artificial intelligence, and we are just kidding ourselves if we think otherwise. It is true to say that we have some sympathy with that point of view (although David is far more optimistic on this than Adam), and while we do believe that many people can develop the capabilities needed, it is certainly not everyone, perhaps not even the majority. In our opinion, AI is going to shake up jobs, roles, professions and industries far more profoundly that we collectively yet realize.

In a thought-provoking interview that we conducted last year with Anthony Day (ex-Monitor Consulting, Deloitte and IBM. Now Head of Strategy and Marketing at Blockchain specialist, Midnight), Anthony made the point that if he was designing the market research agency of the future, the skills he would focus on would be data science and automation. The agency of the future is unlikely to look like anything that today’s market researchers would recognize. This will be true for many jobs, roles, sectors and industries.

How far will AI shake up industry? At the heart of this debate is the distinction between AI as an enabler and AI as a substitute. There is a school of thought that says that “AI won’t replace people—but people who use AI will replace people who don’t”[1]. This holds out the hope that as long as we can use AI (or we can learn to use AI) then there will be a role for us in the future workplace. So the mantra of positivity goes, enlightened organizations will see a rise in productivity through a work enhancing human-AI symbiosis. In terms of employee numbers or more specifically YOUR job, this rather glib idea that people who use AI will replace people who don’t, hides the reality that the AI enabled workplace may need far fewer people or less skilled/ experienced people on the human side of the human-AI equation. Exactly the point of our conference pessimist – the people in the room were probably the more skilled/more experienced practitioners (their organizations had after all spent a couple of thousand Euro sending them to a conference) … but that skill/experience premium was being levelled down by AI. Were they now too experienced (or too expensive), and too set in their ways to retrain as AI practitioners?

At the other end of the spectrum, the relationship between AI and humans may be less of a symbiosis and more of a take-over. There is a view that any human-AI coupling is just an interregnum before AI just takes your job.

“Your job will be lost to someone who knows how to use AI … before it is lost to AI”

Diane Yoon, OpenAI

Given the uncertainty surrounding the impact that AI is going to have, it is not really surprising that our audience last week was sending very mixed messages. They hear that the future belongs to those who will ‘upskill‘, but was does that actually mean. How and where should they be upskilling? In reality, it isn’t just about sharpening up thinking skills and being a bit more creative and adding a little bit of edge to what we’re currently doing. We are now staring down the barrel of a fundamental overhaul of what constitutes valuable skills. Maybe our pessimist was right and this is such a massive shift that the majority of us just will not be able to bend our minds around it … but when you think through the implications of this being true (if it is true), then that can lead you to a very difficult place as a society.

How can we address this uncertainty to better understand what might happen? The leadership theories of Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus described and reflected on the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of general conditions and situations. Trying to understand how the AI revolution is going to play out is VUCA on steroids. Fortunately, we do have tools to help us.

Scenario planning emerged more than 60 years ago in response to the challenge of decision-making under unpredictable uncertainty and is a great tool for laying out some of the plausible possible AI shaped futures, with which one can consider potential implications and responses.

“Scenarios are tools for ordering one's perceptions about, and potential responses to, alternative future environments, in which one's decisions might be played out”

Peter Schwartz, US futurist and co-founder of the Global Business Network

Interestingly, in anticipation of the massive changes that were coming down the road, the authors in their ESOMAR Toronto Congress 2022 paper, written only a few months before the arrival of ChatGTP3, used scenario planning to map out some plausible possible futures for the insight industry. In developing scenarios, we were clearly aware of ‘AI’ as one of the factors on the horizon BUT in building our different scenarios for the future, we assumed that AI would be gradually eased in, working as an enabler over a few years. There would be some time for the insight industry to adjust to the fact that AI would become a substitute for certain insight skills. But what, in fact, happened was that capable AI exploded into the zeitgeist almost overnight and has us scrambling to understand its ramifications and how, as a substitute for human endeavor, it will profoundly change our world. Our fundamental 2022 thesis that professionals following the ‘business as usual’ model were doomed to failure and needed to pivot quickly’ held up. It just came about faster than we had anticipated.

You can read our 2022 ESOMAR paper and presentation here

Alternatively you can see the accompanying video presentation here

If you want to know more about how scenario planning can help you think through the implications of AI and the ‘plausible possible futures that it might unleash – it’s a subject we love to discuss. Just get in touch

[1] ‘Work for an automated, AI-driven world’ IBM August 14, 2023