Technology & Organizations Blog: Accelerate your organization’s performance: Get in Tune with Your People, Organization, and Technology to Thrive
Executives are convinced that organizations leveraging AI are more productive. The revenue and employment numbers mostly disagree. A March 2026 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research surveyed nearly 750 executives and found that the productivity gains leaders perceive from AI are substantially larger than those offered by the data. The authors give it an old name, the…
…and maybe it’s just 10 minutes, except that reading this will take you five, and watching the John Oliver clip may send you down a rathole. Two complaints about AI platforms (Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, etc.) make me crazy. AI is sycophantic. AI hallucinates. Both complaints are real. Both also share a root cause that you can do much to improve: default settings. Plain vanilla is a great ice cream,…
My last post was about what individuals can do to keep pace with AI . The ideas there were: small daily experiments, not waiting for someone to train you, keeping track of what works for you. That post places all the work on you as an individual. This post is about the multiplier: other people. You're unlikely to keep up with AI working in isolation. Your learning compounds faster when it's…
Leveraging generative AI is empowering given the work you can do. GenAI is also somewhat freeing once you realize that the AI will change every day, and it's ok to play a bit of catch-up. When I wrote the original version of this post almost a year ago, I framed the core problem as a gap between machine learning and human learning. That gap has widened. The Pace Is Not Slowing Source: AI Index,…
A recent Wall Street Journal article painted this picture: Silicon Valley techies at a holiday party, sneaking glances at their laptops, checking on fleets of AI bots grinding away on coding tasks while they sipped Celsius (which I’m not cool enough to know I need). The piece by Kate Clark framed AI assistants as the modern Tamagotchi : digital pets with firepower. The next day, I saw Mahnoor…
Chart of practices from Canadians who used AI in job search You’ve honed your AI skills. You may even subscribe to multiple AI platforms to access the best version of whichever generative AI is hot today. You’ve used AI to train for your career and figure out which industry will give you the best opportunity for growth. Now it’s time to apply for jobs. Do you go cold turkey and ghost your AI?…
Studying generative AI is chasing a moving target. The technology shifts daily, and yesterday’s “latest model” is already old news. However, people change, too, just not always at the same speed. What happens when machine learning outruns human learning? Let’s compare the recent pace of AI upgrades with the pace of real human uptake — and I’ll try to convince you of two things: Your organization…
Canada’s bold investments in AI and digital technologies are front-page news, and I’ve been fortunate to contribute to some of that copy . Seven hundred million dollars for AI infrastructure, $1.2 Billion for the Canada Digital Adoption Program —needed investments to be sure. But what if we are missing foundational strategies with much lower price tags? As governments and businesses, are we…
AI can give you and your employees superpowers . However, AI is not (at least yet) a teammate. Set your expectations realistically, keep your options open, and think of AI as pieces of Iron Man’s armor or the tools on Batman’s utility belt. AI is not your sidekick, but it can be fantastic. Pitfalls of the Teammate Mindset Thinking of AI as a teammate is misleading and can foster unrealistic…
I’m always seeking inspiration for tasks I can automate in my work. Zapier’s aptly named blog category, Automation Inspiration , is a great starting point. Wade Foster, Mike Knoop, and Bryan Helmig founded Zapier in 2012 , well before our normal-human access to AI (November 2022) . Zapier’s self-description is: “Zapier is a no-code automation tool that lets you connect your apps into automated…
The unprecedented growth of publicly available AI tools far surpasses workers' top-down training in incorporating AI into their work. This isn’t a critique—it happened too fast to expect us to keep up. Unfortunately, sometimes people craft their work to use these new tools without understanding (or at least abiding by) organizational foundations and controls . Work crafting is when workers…
In the Northern Hemisphere, it’s that time of the year. First day of school pictures, backpacks full of books versus hiking and beach gear, and a flurry of back-to-school sales. Fall of 2023 is also the first year we have a bit of an organized response to the availability of generative AI -- AI trained on massive datasets of prior work and information that then can create new work when we “prompt”…
Every day I see another carefully considered report or thought piece about AI and work. I share my favorites here, on X ( Twitter ) and LinkedIn . However, I also worry every day that the people who most need to take action from these ideas and data are missing out. For example, I went through IBM’s Augmented work for an automated, AI-driven world report today. The authors, Jill Goldstein , Bill…
For the last couple of years, Nitish Gupta and I have published an interactive, hand-curated, quarterly list of AI tools appropriate for individuals and teams to use in their work. Our Spring 2023 effort was right at the start of the explosion of tools as ChatGPT and other generative AI providers opened their capabilities to outside developers. We’d said an AI-supported search tool was on the…
Comment : As we note below, this is a hand-curated list. You will find full search engines here https://www.futuretools.io/ and https://www.futurepedia.io/ Automation is part of our work. The question is whether we are finding the tools to augment our abilities or waiting for our organizations to decide what to automate and who to replace. Research finds that people who craft their work are more…
Preface Realities are barging in on my euphoria about Microsoft 365 Copilot. After a day of sharing shorter and longer versions of the Microsoft announcement, I’m starting to track my questions and those I hear from others. Business Chat works across the LLM, the Microsoft 365 apps, and your data—your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and contacts—to do things you’ve never been able to…
In my last post, I noted the value of acknowledging the hidden talent offered by editors and reviewers . Today, I use a combination of talent, technology, and technique to think through the benefits of acknowledging our workflow, including AI. (I was happy to hear Microsoft mention “prompt history” as a tool on today’s live demo of the Copilot integrations - important to recreate our steps…
The talent around us benefits our work. Publication style guides call for us to cite articles, books, and personal communications, but not our editors. What does this convention cost us? Will new technologies like blockchain enable us to gain the value of better citing all our sources? T Is for Talent -- Often Hidden Susannah Schmidt , the editor for my recent piece in The Conversation : Why using…
ChatGPT launched on wednesday. today it crossed 1 million users! — Sam Altman (@sama) December 5, 2022 Every good blog post needs a hook. For today, I wanted to leverage the continued growth of ChatGPT registered users. Given it hit 1 million in 5 days, where must it be now? Likely some big, juicy number that would be great for this post. I asked Chatsonic “where can I verify the number of…
DALL·E 2023-01-14 20.11.05 - computer chimera plagiarizing a book I finished my Fall MBA teaching before the explosion of ChatGPT - a chatbot that can write, code, and answer questions. The next time I teach this material will be in a different world. ChatGPT reached 1 million registered users in 5 days and continues to grow. My innovation course for our Management of Technology MBA is writing…