Engagement and AI - challenges and opportunities

Like everyone, I'm thinking a lot about AI and the engagement challenges and opportunities it presents.

1. We need to engage our employees into using AI

This is the big social challenge within organisations, owing to the usual resistance to change, the fear of people losing their jobs, and people being overwhelmed with where to start.

This is a MASSIVE ENGAGEMENT NEED.

This is happening now just as it happened with the internet, then with social media. If you're a leader, you need to be thinking now about how you are engaging people on the change journey of AI.

2. How AI itself is engaging

The AI agents people encounter — on phone calls, in customer service, in products — vary hugely in how engaging they are. Many AI products are not engaging to even begin with.

We must design engagement into our AI, not assume it will happen. There is decades of research on how humans interact with systems, machines, and agents — and most AI builders are not drawing on it.

3. Where humans must be

We must understand where AI must stop, and humans must be. For instance, physical interaction creates chemicals in humans that virtual interactions do not.

Where is the human in the machine?

4. Engagement as a competitive advantage in the face of AI commoditisation

When AI can build anything, and websites all begin to look the same, what gives you the advantage?

It is engagement that makes you choose — and stick — with one over another.

The best bit, that most "AI Gurus" won't even know, is that there is research going back decades on all of this: how humans interact with systems and agents, how humans engage with change that scares them, what creates relationships both human and virtual.