Chapter 1: How can organizations effectively use AI in the workplace?
How to make AI work for work. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino. In his new book, How to AI, Wall Street Journal tech columnist Christopher Mims offers a guide for getting the most out of the technology. He's compiled two dozen laws of AI to shed light on the best ways to use these generative tools.
Yesterday, we talked about how individuals can improve their productivity with AI. And today, we're digging into how organizations can use or sometimes misuse it.
One I saw recently is bosses think that AI saves their workers a lot more time than workers say it actually does.
Chapter 2: What are the common misconceptions about AI's impact on productivity?
So I think bosses are looking for every excuse to keep headcount flat or reduce headcount. That's a big disconnect. I mean, another big disconnect is that when you are trying to change the way that systems work, you have to do it collectively. It's like, great, now we have to change the whole workflow for how we do this particular job or
all going to have to get on board and that's going to take time. I mean, this is why people go to business school. It's called change management. I mean, it is a dry subject, but very necessary.
One of your laws of AI that seems applicable here is that we should treat AI as if it were an assembly line robot. What do you mean by that?
The folks who get the biggest productivity benefit from agentic AI are figure out what are the really basic tasks that it can do reliably.
Chapter 3: What are the laws of AI that can guide its implementation?
A lot of businesses now love using AI-based systems to record every sales call that they make and then evaluate, well, how could we have done that better? And I have heard this really is increasing the productivity of a lot of salespeople because, you know, this AI that's always listening is like, well, what about this? Or other salespeople have found that this works.
And so it's just there as an assistant reminding you.
Let's talk some more about some of the examples that you cite in the book of how specific companies are successfully using AI. One company you talk a lot about is Clorox, maybe not the most tech forward company that comes to mind, but how are they using AI?
Yeah, I love Clorox as an example and other examples in the book, construction companies, et cetera, because these are not the companies that you think of as being very tech forward. But AI is allowing a lot of companies to kind of leapfrog. So before maybe they were laggards.
And now because especially generative AI makes it easier for them to do new things, they can try out stuff that they couldn't before. So Clorox was actually a pioneer in using generative AI, the image-based generative AI technology to create advertisements. Now, these are really simple advertisements. This is like, you know, the little square ads that pop up on web pages that you're looking at.
And they just allow them to generate many more variants of, you know, snack foods that you would pair with ranch dressing because, believe it or not, Clorox owns Hidden Valley Ranch, which actually sells more every year than bottled ketchup. Yeah, America's number one condiment. Ads for it now powered by AI.
And they also used AI as kind of a brainstorming tool to come up with a new product, the toilet bomb. How did that happen?
Yeah, they were early adopters of... I think they were using... Microsoft's co-pilot system, which of course underneath is just ChatGPT, to be another voice in their brainstorming session. So there's actually a fair amount of research on this.
If you ask business school students to come up with new business ideas, an individual paired with a chatbot is going to come up with more and better ideas than an individual on their own. A team with a chatbot on the team, same thing. So they were kind of just...
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