Dear reader,
You, like me, are interested in how AI can impact the world of work. You, like me, are probably a bit apprehensive about what may come to pass in the next years and decades as AI improves.
This is normal. During every period of rapidly advancing technology, there is always the potential for disaster. You could argue that the industrial revolution set us on a course toward climate collapse, that the printing press allowed propaganda to be mass-commercialized and spread, and that the discovery of fire enabled arsonists to start doing their thing, but the problem was never the technology; it was the people using it.
I know this sounds a bit like the pro-gun argument (guns don’t kill people, people do), but guns are much more immediately dangerous than other tools. While it’s actually kind of correct, we still don’t want psychopaths to have easy access to guns. The same is true with AI. However, I believe that democratising the use of AI is important for the future of society. Left only in the hands of psychopaths, narcissists, or people driven purely by greed, it will harm humankind greatly.
Right now, I don’t think it’s worth being too doom-and-gloom-focused when it comes to AI. AI (or should I say, GenAI, as opposed to true Artificial General Intelligence) is here, and it’s disrupting our world. While some speculate that pivoting to AI reliance is being used as a convenient excuse for tech companies who simply want to decrease their bloat, it’s true that what we’re being told in the media points to an AI-influenced job market that is becoming increasingly difficult for even highly-skilled workers.
In my beloved Luxembourg, we’ve seen Docler Holdings lay off 115 employees, which is a huge number in a country with a population of 600,000 people. Fiverr, Salesforce, and Klarna have all laid off workers internationally as they pivot to relying more on AI. Already, we’re seeing regret from companies like Klarna, whose customer service quality has been suffering since this decision.
A study released this summer from MIT revealed that AI pilots are not going as well as many CEOs would want you to believe. And, from my own insight, these layoffs are primarily coming from large enterprises, who have the ability to perform large, disruptive layoffs. Small businesses tend to not follow the same pattern.
My prediction is that the companies who view AI as a human replacement are going to go the way of companies who treated employees equally poorly in other ways historically. I’m talking about companies running company towns, which required employees to use vouchers given by the employer to buy their food and necessities back from the employer, essentially working for nothing gained. I’m talking about companies that held on strong to gender divides, paying women less until they were legislated into paying employees equally. I’m talking about companies that have always laid off workers with no thought or care... eventually, bad behaviour comes back to bite you, even if you’re currently the biggest bully on the block.
Business school left a lasting impression on me—that the best* companies were also the most ethical: Ford, the Mondragón cooperative movement, and Grupo Bimbo come to mind. I don’t know where many of the current tech leaders missed this message. Maybe it’s because so many of them haven't academically studied business. Cynically, I think they may not care because some of them are only interested in what their bank accounts can accomplish within their own lifetimes.
To get to the point, it is my view that using AI will be imperative in the next few years in order to run a functioning business (especially a small business). But, how we use it matters.
If you’re someone, like me, who has managed to get AI to perform a task that you dread, with accuracy, you’ll know how much relief that gives you, as a worker, to focus on the aspects of your job that bring you joy. If you are a business owner with ethics, you’ll know that this sounds like the perfect way to reward your employees for doing the grunt work that makes your business function, and that their human knowledge is essential to making sure any bad work done by the AI is caught and handled.
Here are 3 steps to make sure you’re implementing AI in an ethical way to support the long-term growth of your business. Have ideas for other ethical AI practices than what I’ve listed here? I’d love to hear from you. Please fill out the contact form on my website and I’ll get back to you shortly.
Anyone who has ever applied for and obtained a job knows it is so much more than what’s in the job description. Some job descriptions do give this clue by saying “and other related tasks as needed” or other vague statements.
For many people in this world, if you were to ask them to write down with precise detail every task that comes across their desk, they would miss at least 50% of it.
For example, I used to be a marketing manager at a B2B tech company. I did a little bit of everything: conference sponsorship, CRM management, email marketing, digital marketing, graphic design, internal communications, and more. If you wanted to replace me with AI, you’d have a team of agents for conference sponsorship that would require management by a human to make sure it got everything right: the choice of booth, the graphics, the speaker’s presentation, the hotels and transportation for the staff, the swag, the evening cocktail event sponsored by our partners and all the complex requirements which come along with the partner event agreement... this mostly covers 1 part of what I did, and this was my first “professional” job out of university.
What I could have used back then:
Replacing tasks means your employees can focus more on tasks that are a bit more human: creativity, relationship building, or even enjoying themselves. I would have had a lot more fun at conference networking events if I didn’t have a constant running list in my head of tasks to complete!
It’s no secret that we are living in a historical decade. The pandemic made everyone a little weirder than they used to be, and some world leaders seem to be taking advantage of that.
This means that where you spend your cash, store your data, and run the digital parts of your business are actually important to consider for the future of the world, and your own business.
We can’t predict what the USA political situation will look like in 5 years, just as we can’t predict where China will be, or India, or Russia, or any of the large nations that dominate the tech world in ways obvious and more subtle.
For now, I’m betting on tech made in the EU. While you might lose out on benefits from the sexy “sheen” of American tech, or the ruthless drive for victory displayed by their Chinese counterparts, the tech built in Europe is secure, reliable, and is predicated upon a base level respect for data privacy and sovereignty. The Eurostack Initiative is a great resource to learn more about the importance of focusing on European technology for your business.
We’re spoiled in Luxembourg in that our government is working on getting MeluXina-AI off the ground, which should be available for commercial use in 2026. We also have companies like Proximus NXT, Clarence Cloud, or even the Post who offer sovereign cloud options, and of course, Crystallised Intelligence offering AI Business Process Transformation with a focus on responsible AI use.
It’s no secret that AI takes a lot of energy and water. Each query you make, including each Google Search with a Gemini result, each smart reply you use, and more and more AI-driven chatbots on eCommerce sites are all examples of where the use of AI slips into our daily lives with us barely noticing.
While you can go through each app on your phone and turn off these features as an individual, it’s harder to do at work.
You may consider:
These are not the only ways to reduce your misuse of AI in the corporate world, but they’re a starting point to consider—is this improving my business? Is it worth the impact on the environment? Or are there other, more strategic ways I can use AI that honors our planet and its inhabitants?
This is a non-exhaustive list of best practices, but a good place to start. If you’re interested in working with me to use AI to help your business grow, please get in touch below.
*Best does not necessarily mean most financially performative but to me it does mean they perform well enough financially to endure long term, and that their employees feel good working there.
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