How ‘people-first AI’ creates competitive advantage

Businesses have reached the hard part of implementing AI: After initial investment and experimentation, they are knee-deep in the messier phase of execution. CIOs and other leaders face big decisions about how entire business functions will use AI at scale—and how to navigate the impact of those decisions on jobs, roles, and teams.  

It’s easy to get caught up in endless studies and headlines about AI and people: How many jobs will AI eliminate vs. how many it will create? What types of roles are most vulnerable to automation vs. those that aren’t? What proportion of overall tasks will AI take over?

The clearest insight on these questions, I think, comes from Garry Kasparov and the world of championship chess. 

In 1997, the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue infamously beat the chess grandmaster in a six-game match. But the loss didn’t send Kasparov into forced retirement. Intrigued by the technology, the reigning world champ began pursuing a different idea: As he recalled recently in Harvard Business Review, the experience led him “to rethink how the intellectual game of chess could be approached differently, not simply as an individual effort but as a collaborative one.”

So began a series of experiments pairing players and computers not as opponents but partners. By 2005, one “freestyle” chess tournament allowed players of any skill level, from amateurs to grandmasters, to team up with computers to try and beat their opponents. While many expected the grandmaster-led teams to walk away with all the prize money, it was a pair of amateur American players, collaborating with three computers, who won the tournament. 

What gave the less experienced team the winning edge? As Kasparov writes, “it was their ability to coordinate and coach effectively their computers that defeated the combination of a smart grandmaster and a PC with great computational power.”

People-first AI: The power of augmented intelligence

Twenty years later, that lesson couldn’t be more relevant. While AI—in many different forms and applications—shows immense potential in handling the repetitive tasks that humans still perform, the bigger opportunity for leaders to explore is how humans and AI do better when they work together.

In the world of machine learning, this is a concept known as augmented intelligence. At my company, Freshworks, we put it in practice as “people-first AI.” Simply put, people-first AI is a human-centered approach to AI implementation that places employees in partnership—not competition—with AI to enhance their productivity, performance, learning, and decision-making. It governs how we develop and use all of our AI-powered software products. 

Read also: How AI can boost the growth engine of our economy: Mid-market companies

The benefits of this approach are starting to emerge in how companies around the world are using AI more broadly. In a new global workplace survey by Freshworks—covering over 4,000 employees in the U.S., U.K., ​Germany, France, Australia, New Zealand, and India—workers reported how AI is helping them be more time-efficient and eliminating busywork. They also said AI is delivering more business value than ever before while also boosting job satisfaction, job retention, compensation, and career prospects. 

Where companies are deploying AI in a coordinated partnership with humans—not as a wholesale replacement through automation—they are seeing some of the magic that happens when they offload the most tedious parts of their jobs to AI and gain back valuable time.

In the survey, nearly all employees (98%) said they were reinvesting that time in three important ways:

• Being more productive (71%)

• Doing more creative or complex work (66%)

• Coaching or mentoring other employees (67%)

The busywork dividend

As AI shoulders more of the burdens of busywork, businesses will bank the resulting dividend as workers focus more on strategic tasks that drive results. In our report, over a third of customer service employees, for example, report that AI is now generating more business value than ever. 

At Freshworks, we’ve followed the people-first approach in how we are integrating AI tools into our engineering processes. Our software engineers are using AI to improve code quality, speed up development cycles, and learn new skills. In particular, AI is giving junior engineers more immediate exposure to industry best practices, and 61% of engineers have seen improvements in code quality, reducing defects and technical debt. 

When AI takes on routine work—whether it is the rote calculations involved in plotting the impact of chess moves, or sorting service tickets in a massive IT service operation—it frees people to focus on tasks that require their creativity, intuition, and strategic thinking, and deliver a layer of value that AI can’t. 

What Kasparov showed a quarter-century ago remains true today—it’s a winning combination that business leaders need to take advantage of.