AI Will Change Us as Knowledge Workers

AI is going to change our economy and businesses in fundamental ways. CEOs and Boards of Directors everywhere seem to be impatient already for this efficiency and profitability revolution. But this revolution in the economy will not happen until we undergo a revolution in our own thinking.

Rapid AI transformation? Not so fast.

There is an interim phase in this AI transformation that will take some time. This step is a personal, human change in ourselves...in our understanding of ourselves as productive workers, thinkers, and do-ers.

What is dawning on us, I believe, is the realization that our psychological habits of thought, possibly even our identity, our sense of self, at least as a professional person, must change because of AI.

Like all human psychological changes, this will take time.

We need AI-savvy knowledge workers

To reshape business with AI, we have to have AI-enabled workers. To be an AI-enabled worker, we have to get clear--or at least comfortable--with a post-AI sense of self, our sense of being a capable worker, of being a valuable person in the working world. That's a process we are all just starting.

We used to use a pencil & a notebook to assist our thinking & planning. Now we will use AI agents. A huge amount of what we call "cognition" is going to move from inside us. It's going to become embodied cognition, that is, it's going to exist in our AI tools, just like we moved some of our thinking to jottings in a notebook.

Giving up work to AI agents

What "thinking" moves to the AI will be the pattern-recognition tasks, because that is what AI really is: A pattern-recognition and language predicting engine. We used to think of this kind of cognition as pretty complicated stuff: summarize this report; write a sales email; generate a project plan; analyze this survey data. But it turns out this knowledge work is really just manipulating or generating structured information according to familiar, predictable patterns. Because AI is so good at creating this type of content, we'll switch to using AI tools to do this kind of "thinking" for us. It can do it faster than we can, with increasing reliability and accuracy. AI tools still unwittingly insert hallucinations--that is, falsities, made-up facts...what look to us like lies.

AI agents do work but they don't think

I say "un-witting" in its root meaning: not thinking, without mind. AI is not understanding anything. It's simply producing language or images that match patterns it has been trained to match. There is no moral or cognitive impulse to tell the truth or to lie. It's a computer program executing to produce an output according to rules. Its output looks and sounds to us as if there is a consciousness behind it. But that is our human hallucination. This is the challenge that knowledge workers of the near future will have to plan for, manage, and overcome. This will be the nature of work and knowledge work going forward.

Our value as knowledge workers will anchor in rare and subtle skills

Our human work will become that of the creative director, systems engineer, project manager, thought leader, subject matter expert, editor, coordinator, evaluator, systems thinker, and curator. We must become leaders of swarms of AI agents that operate according to our instructions. We must be knowledgeable and expert enough to spot hallucinations in the AI work product in time to correct them. Above all, we must become wise enough, creative enough, independent enough, confident enough, and critical enough to create a vision of what we want, and to guide, challenge and correct our AI workers until we achieve that vision. Even if it is just a sales email.

These are higher order creative and cognitive skills. These are leadership skills. These are matters of vision, taste, aesthetics, judgement, discernment, trust, integrity, and morality. Today, only the leaders in our society and economy get to practice these skills to the point of mastery. We define leaders as people who are excellent at these meta-tasks.

The challenge and opportunity of the AI age is for every knowledge worker to shift their identity to center on these skills and their confident expression.

AI will force this change on us. But the AI revolution will not happen until we embrace this change in ourselves.

Note: Orginally published in my LinkedIn Newsletter, Agents and Audiences.