A case for AI Qwerty

Techies love the 80:20 rule. Imagine there’s a bit of tech that would do the 20% of laborious tasks people have to do during their working day.

Over the course of a 35-hour week, a 20% timesaving means every worker would have seven hours of extra time to work on more productive things. In one year, assuming people take, on average, 25 days’ leave per annum, this piece of tech would deliver 47 days of extra work.

Another way to look at it is that if the tech is provided to five people, the business gets an extra person’s worth of work. And if the business does not require an extra person, there may well be conversations about reducing headcount because the tech is now doing 20% of the work. No wonder business leaders are so very interested in everything to do with artificial intelligence (AI).

But let’s examine those seven extra hours per week of potential productivity gain. Will someone who is using AI to fulfil 20% of their work immediately become 20% more productive and fill the time they have gained with more and more useful tasks to boost the business? Let’s face it: people are never going to be 100% productive. In fact, that 20% of laborious tasks may be the time they get to recover before they ramp up again. And this ramping up and down may well help them to perform at their best each and every day.

In the world of athletics, interval training is a training session involving intense periods of physical activity followed by a brief recovery break. This cycle of intense activity followed by recovery is repeated for the duration of the training session. Its effect has been proven to improve cardiorespiratory fitness. The human body is not designed to do intense exercise non-stop.

And in the context of work, taking away those laborious tasks does not necessarily allow workers to do more meaningful things. It’s a hard taskmaster who expects workers to be productive all of the time.

Their productivity may well plateau. Just like a car engine at the rev limit or a processor in a computer that is maxed out, people simply cannot operate at 100% all of the time. Eventually something will break.

It is said that the Qwerty keyboard was invented to slow down typists, to prevent mechanical typewriters from jamming. Taking away the 20% of laborious tasks does not necessarily allow workers to do more meaningful things and in this era of AI hyperefficiency, we must all have an honest conversation about how it should be deployed to ensure we have the time to slow down when we need to.