By Peju Kukoyi
Productivity is the élan vital of any business enterprise. Productivity is when a business is able to constantly achieve greater output with fewer resources. Productivity needs to be sustainable given its direct relationship with an organisations revenue and bottomline.
In todays fiercely competitive business world, where brand loyalty by customers counts for little, organisations cannot afford to lag between, hence smart businesses continue to innovative and find creative ways to motivate their workforces for progressively higher productivity. Some business owners have turned to machines, incorporating generative artificial intelligence and machine learning tools into the enterprise to boost productivity.
Since productivity is about cost reduction and efficiency, the key question among business owners today is which is more cost effective: motivated human workforce or deployment of GenAI. In this piece, I have taken a critical look at the key strengths and limitations of human workforce versus GenAI, ML, and other digital tools, which boosts productivity more, and the case for adoption.
Human workforce and productivity
Organisations like to emphasize how critical their workforce is to the success of the business. Indeed, human resources remains the backbone of any organisation. They interpret the vision of the promoter(s) and are able to combine other resources to achieve business objectives.
Apart from the technical skill required to function well in specific roles, human workforce has other critical skills that are essential for leadership and motivation. Emotional intelligence, which defines the ability to read a room and determine the appropriate action to take or words to use, is an important skill that promotes leadership and loyalty in the workplace. It is simply an individual who knows how to make people, in this case coworkers, comfortable around him/her.
Another important skill a human worker can master and display is creativity and critical thinking. Also important to the growth of a business is the ability of the workforce to lead, negotiate, empathize, and manage relationships. Humans can adapt socially and ethically to complex, volatile situations and they bring judgment, context, and values that GenAI cannot replicate.
Despite the important skills above that individuals can muster to motivate a team, unit, an organisation, humans have biases, they get fatigued, they may be resistant to change, and slower in processing large data. They cost the organisation salaries, health insurance, allowances, and money spent in regular training to update their knowledge. These are challenges that could cost the business lost hours and productivity. Humans can call in sick or resign suddenly, both of which are highly disruptive and can lead to incomplete tasks. Management has a big role to play, including putting in the time, effort, and the budget, to motivate the workforce and ensure the productivity levels remain high. This is achieved through adequate remuneration, conducive work environment, provision of necessary tools, provision of growth opportunities, and constant engagements between the staff and management or promoters of the business.
GenAI and productivity
Now let us juxtapose the above against GenAI. Tools like GenAI can process massive amounts of information quickly. An SME, for instance, with operations across the country and thousands of clients can deploy GenAI to analyse customer data and highlight key features that the company can exploit to create newer, relevant, and targeted solutions, or enhance already existing solutions. While such a task will take GenAI hours to conclude, a human analyst will likely take days to complete the task. Code drafts that would ordinarily take a software developer hours or days to write will take GenAI minutes to achieve.
The turnover speed of a GenAI makes it the ideal option to deploy for repetitive tasks such as data analysis, report writing, coding drafts, and research. Deploy GenAI for such tasks, helps to reduce the time-to-market for the business. This will give such a business the edge against competition. The software, unlike humans, can work round the clock once the right prompts and parameters have been set; it does not get fatigued.
A machine or software is incapable of emotional intelligence, lacks creativity at the human level. It can generate errors or what is called hallucinations and without proper human oversight that could be damaging to a company; it could cost a company a business, new client(s), income, and most importantly reputational damage. Tools such as GenAI, machine learning, and others still depend on both high-quality data provided by humans and human guidance.
Human workforce vs GenAI
So, really, the answer to the question of which is more productive: a motivated human workforce or a cold emotionless software or machine is not a simple one or the other. They both possess great attributes, skills/functionalities that could make them highly productive and could make the choice of one over the other appear brilliant. However, if some of the limitations of both are factored in, it becomes clear that a business may struggle if it depended on one.
Competitive businesses today have designed a way to fuse the two together and reap the benefits of synergy. A hybrid solution, where both humans and GenAI are combined in the right mix in an organisation, has been proven to be a productivity promoter. GenAI has shown great aptitude for repetitive, low-value tasks and is so adept at crunching great amounts of data in record time. It can be deployed to manage such tasks while the human is focused on innovating and providing leadership.
Businesses that have managed to combine the two and optimise their benefits have achieved consistently great results through enhanced productivity. Interswitch, Google, Apple, Microsoft, GTBank, Stanbic IBTC, and many others have shown how the synergy between man and machine could produce consistently great results thereby enhancing the business ROI.
Many fear that machine could replace them in the workplace. While this may be true for some mundane tasks, the truth is that GenAI amplifies human capacity and can never take the place of relationship, creativity, and innovation. A case in point. In June this year, a doctor in Florida, US, performed a surgery to remove the prostate cancer on a man 7,000 miles away in Angola, Africa. This momentous activity was possible because of the synergy between man and machine.
