When you think about the future of work with artificial intelligence, consider the things that don’t change. For example, how people think about accountability.
A person can only be responsible for so much work. At some point, they need a second person to take on more work. As the second person gets things done, the first person starts trusting them more and not checking in so much. If the second person doesn’t get those things done, they are held responsible for it.
AI can help a person get more done, but at the end of the day, it’ll probably be a while before a person can blame AI for doing something wrong. In the meantime, a person will be blamed for not fixing an AI’s hallucinations, or missing a detail that an AI did not summarize, etc. (Not to mention—sometimes, the effort is the point.)
Professional services is a multi-trillion dollar industry, and it largely exists because of this dynamic: when you hire a trusted professional services company, you can trust them to get the work done. If they don’t, you have somebody to hold responsible.
Even with all of the AI tools at your disposal, there’s still nothing quite as seamless as finding a person who is an expert—capable, competent, and trustworthy—and assigning them work.