Part 3: Executive interview with Deloitte’s Michael Stephan

In part three of our exclusive four-part interview with Deloitte’s Michael Stephan, attention turns to the inescapable and yet critical issue of artificial intelligence (AI). As is often said, it’s a technology that has been in use in HR for longer than you’d think, certainly in recruitment tech and learning management systems, but now, generative AI has opened up the possibility of accelerated productivity directly to the workforce.

Stephan believes we need to ask a more fundamental question: “let’s take a step back for a moment. When you break down how people work, it’s how people gather information, right? How people gather insights, how people communicate.

“So if we think about information, insights, and communication, that has a direct impact on how all workers work inside of an organization, well, generative AI is imposing new and different ways to gather information, gather insights, and communicate.”

He’s not wrong – many of the most exciting applications are outside the current scope of our understanding, seeing as “it’s not only increasing accessibility to information that goes well beyond the organization’s four walls or an individual or a team’s knowledge set, it’s opening up that information and insights to the world based on this ability to gather a whole bunch of data.”

Where’s the value add?

As always though – the imperative is on us to look more closely at where both human and machine can add the most value; to “look at work in a more specific way to say, where can the work benefit from greater insights, from greater information, from increased accessibility, which ultimately creates increased speed, which increases or improves overall productivity.”

“Augmentation not automation” – a mantra of Deloitte’s recent research, as Stephan echoes his co-worker Steve Hatfield, noting that “enduring human capabilities like curiosity and empathy and critical thinking that tools like generative AI don’t have, and that experience and human performance always includes these enduring human capabilities.”

You can watch the full video above.

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Deloitte are a headline sponsor of both UNLEASH America and UNLEASH World. You can find all their activity on the Deloitte hub page here.