I was struck by a remarkable statement by software engineer Kent Beck, the author of ‘Extreme Programming’. “I have been reluctant to try ChatGPT”, he tweeted, “today I got over that reluctance. Now I understand why I was reluctant. The value of 90% of my skills just dropped to $0. The leverage of the remaining 10% went up 1000x. I need to recalibrate.” I got reminded of this, as I was flipping through a new report (https://bit.ly/3BGbIby ) on AI and the future of work by Microsoft WorkLab. It had some interesting revelations: More than half of the typical workday of a corporate employee was devoted to communication like emails, meetings, chats, etc. The remaining 43% was for actual creative tasks, and even a lot of that was also about creating spreadsheets, documents in various formats or slides to present in the aforesaid meetings. No wonder that more than two-thirds of workers complained that they did not have uninterrupted focused time during their workday. I tend to resonate with this. I was a corporate citizen for more than two decades and have been a solopreneur for the last few years. While there are infinite struggles being an entrepreneur, my level of productivity has ratcheted up several times unencumbered by countless meetings discussing the very same issues, the similar information being presented to different people in different formats, and virtually no time to do any deep thinking.

As the Generative AI tidal wave sweeps across industries and offices, I believe that the area it will impact the most is this area of corporate work. We often do not consider work as an industry – though it is a several trillion dollar one – and confuse work with jobs. We are rightly worried about how AI will impact jobs but tend to neglect how it will impact work. Investigating this, I stumbled on another post, this time in LinkedIn, which had a wonderful way to deconstruct work into three kinds. The first is where you Act-as a role: an accountant, a programmer, a marketer, or a journalist. The second is where you Show-as a format: a slide, a chart, a spreadsheet, code, or a summary. Finally, the third is where you Create-a task: an essay, a recipe, ad copy, code or a sales pitch.

The Show-as part is probably the most tiresome and repetitive one for a worker. Good visualization and presentation are important, but very time consuming and often tedious. This is where Generative AI is coming into its own, with innovations like Microsoft Copilot building slides, charts and documents on the fly, and even converting content from one format, say a document, to another, say a slide deck. As we have realised, ChatGPT and its ilk are reasonably proficient at cognitive tasks, and therefore have the potential to help humans in the third work area of creating tasks. Copy and Jasper help create great marketing material, Stable Diffusion and DALL E2 create amazing images for artists and designers, Jukebox helping create ad jingles, or GitHub Copilot writing solid code. AI will not create the perfect pieces of work, at least not yet, and will require a human worker to finesse and finetune it to perfection. What this will allow is to enable you and me to focus more on the Act-as part of work – being a star investigative journalist, or a 10x programmer, a creative marketer, or a meticulous accountant. In a sense, it will allow us to go back to the roots of work, where we could spend our working hours far more productively doing either high cognitive or intense manual jobs, leaving the mundane and the repetitive ones to AI.

There is a flipside, though, of delegating the basic jobs to AI. There are a lot of human workers who do these jobs to earn a living – whether they be customer service reps, or basic programmers or payroll accountants. As the Generative AI express train rolls into organisations, these jobs are at risk; cases in point are Vodafone which wants to cut jobs by nearly half and use AI instead, or IBM halting some recruitment for the same reason. This is where we humans will have to step up and learn how to work with AI and develop an AI Aptitude as the WorkLab report calls it. We have been good at working with revolutionary technologies – we learnt how to use powerful tools like fire, the PC, and the Internet to make our work better and to create new jobs for humans. We will have to do the same with this most powerful technology of them all and use it to lift ourselves away from the mundane and the monotonous. It will not be AI which takes our jobs, a human being using AI could, and we need to choose which of two humans we are. We need to recalibrate