Whether you think it will enslave you or liberate you, AI is sitting in front of you now, offering to answer your emails, tell you which of your colleagues you need to talk to, or what content may be relevant to you. Rebecka Isaksson, a keynote speaker at this year’s CILIP Conference, 12-13 July in Birmingham,explains why she thinks we must continue to explore the positive potential.

A Global headline-grabbing open letter about the perils of AI was published just before Information Professional spoke to Rebecka, a KM and AI expert with years of experience at Microsoft. Signed by the likes of Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, the letter calls for a pause on “giant AI experiments”, specifically technology being developed by companies like Microsoft. It said: “We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”

Rebecka said: “I agree that it is very important to address AI responsibly and that common values and guidelines for how to use this powerful technology are needed. But that work has been ongoing for several years already and the conversation is already happening across nations and across the industry. I am not sure that pressing pause, as the letter suggested, is the best way to go because AI is already here and it is here to stay. I think the work that the UK government did, resulting in the policy report titled AI regulation: a pro-innovation approach has an important take on this, as it clearly states the need for a practical and outcome-centric approach to AI – to realise all that potential value in public services, that is so much needed in most countries.”

New model

Many organisations are struggling to define a hybrid work model that fits them and is sustainable over time, but AI could provide a solution.

“The pandemic really accelerated the adoption of modern collaboration tools and drove a lot of innovation for the tech companies,” says Rebecka. “We had to find new ways to connect and collaborate in a virtual environment and that was a good thing.”

Post pandemic, the problem has morphed, and Rebecka says: “The main challenge that I see now, is how we shift from a remote work style, into a hybrid work model that is inclusive and sustainable. There is no lack of research showing that the average work week has increased for many employees by sometimes as much as eight hours per week. Productivity has gone up for sure and companies appreciate that. But to maintain that level of productivity without taking employee wellbeing into account poses a great risk for burn-out, losing competent employees and thus creating a knowledge drain.”

Value of trust

One of the revealing statistics Rebecka uses in her blog – from the Microsoft Work Trend Index report (https://bit.ly/3NvXwst) – is that 85 per cent of leaders trust their staff less when they are hybrid working.

But Rebecka adds that employers who do trust their staff are benefiting most: “The most successful organisations that I have seen to date are the ones that do not dictate how many days a week, or which days of the week, that employees are allowed to work from home or required to work from the office.

“They are the ones that embrace the possibility to create a flexible hybrid work model, so that employees can plan and integrate their personal and professional lives. That drives quality of life and employee wellbeing and happiness that I am convinced is a pre-requisite for a productive, creative and innovative work force.

“Knowledge Management becomes centric in this when we take the broader view on KM and focus on both the tacit and the explicit knowledge. AI is a great enabler here, as it allows us to codify and find information that is not necessarily written down in a structured format but scattered across internal and external sites, conversations and chats, and documents.”

Flexible work

Rebecka acknowledges there may be differences between employer and employee benefits from hybrid working, pointing out: “From the employee point of view, I think it is safe to say that most people are driven and motivated by feeling valued and relevant. That the work that we do is appreciated and recognised. We want to feel seen, heard and included. Perhaps most importantly we need to feel trusted.

“We are constantly torn between work and family obligations, and we have personal needs to rest, recuperate and look after our health that are sometimes hard to fulfil if you have to be in the office from nine to five, five days a week.

“During the pandemic we saw an increasing tolerance amongst colleagues and between employees and employers to work in more flexible ways – we had our kids pop in during a Teams call, or we took a one-to-one as a walk-and-talk, when the situation allowed. And that generated more freedom to get up and move, get some fresh air, have dinner with the family or walk the dog.

“In many ways it enhanced our quality of life and enabled us to produce more, with higher quality, as our physical and mental wellbeing was also tended to. There shouldn’t be any need to change that now. Why there is such a lack of trust from many employers point of views, in spite of all the research pointing to the opposite, is hard to explain and quite frankly hard to understand.”

Virtual engagement

Much of Rebecka’s work has focused on how to identify, gather and use the tacit knowledge in an organisation, not only the explicit: “My career in KM started some 10 years ago. I was in a Project Manager role, at the Swedish subsidiary of MS, and through an internal project I came into contact with the Communities of Practice – special interest groups, or discussion fora, that largely resided in the MS professional services division. Their purpose was connecting people across a 20,000 strong consulting team world-wide.

“It was a great way for consultants, architects and sales folks to connect with one another and exchange knowledge and experiences but also ask questions and share content, that could be leveraged in ongoing engagements.”

She says the business value of these communities was not only about exchanging knowledge and experiences between peers though: “The sense of belonging and sense of purpose that community engagement and work created for so many people cannot be ignored. How friendships and trust were built between people in different countries that had never even met in person. The power of those connections and the bonds that were created resulted in a lot of problem solving and innovation that was harvested, curated and eventually packaged, as service products that could be repeated on many similar engagements but also sold as service products, with a certain quality stamp.”

She adds: “The leadership aspect and how we were able to find and grow talent from within the company, and leverage those informal leaders as change agents for some of the culture transformation initiatives we undertook was incredibly powerful. People tend to listen more, and follow the leaders they chose, because they respect them and look up to them – and not only the formal leaders they are mandated to pay attention to.”

Coherent workforce

An untrusting employer might put their faith in hard performance indicators, but Rebecka suggests that the combined capabilities of KM and AI will make the value of tacit knowledge and trust obvious enablers for creating engagement.

“It doesn’t matter how skilled or experienced your employees are, if they do not participate, or if they are not focused on or even aware of the company goals and objectives. Creating engagement across all individuals and teams can be difficult even when everyone is in the same location and even more so when some of us are meeting in person, while others are joining remotely. This is where technology, both on the hardware and software sides, makes all the difference.

“It is not a silver bullet, but it is a pre-requisite and enabler, for creating a sustainable, inclusive employee experience. We need to adopt certain ways of working and modern technology to create an environment where this is possible – smart meeting rooms, common collaboration tools etc.”

Responsible AI

Rebecka says that there will be misuse of AI like any other technology. “If you have ill intent, you have ill intent and you’re going to do bad things,” adding that this is why we should regard AI as an enabler and focus on AI at the service of humans.

She says: “It is absolutely possible to do this responsibly and the attraction is that it also creates a much greater opportunity to shift employees focus from mundane tasks, to value-add work. It is important to remember that AI is not here to replace humans, but to empower and support us to make more well-informed and better decisions, as it enables us to leverage much bigger volumes of information and data. Volumes at such a scale that it would take a person years to digest while AI can digest and synthesise it for us in seconds.

“I know my former employer has worked on that for a long time, and others in the industry as well. There has been a lot of talk about ethical and responsible AI. And that’s where me and my partners at AI Lab Sweden AB are trying to make a difference in educating decision-makers, not only as tech evangelists but also from a legal and ethical point of view – what do you need to think about as an organisation?”

AI Lab Sweden AB

Since leaving Microsoft Rebecka has joined AI Lab Sweden AB (https://ailabbet.com/). “This is a new company andstart-up formed by ex-Microsofties with extensive experience from different business areas within Microsoft. Our focus is on driving awareness and providing strategic advisory services around the possibilities that AI brings and how we can leverage it in responsible, ethical and legal ways, while protecting information security and personal integrity. AI is already here and we all use it every day, without even thinking about it. The potential for driving business value and shifting work away from administrative low-value tasks is huge. For any organisation in both private and public sectors.”

AI-powered Knowledge solutions

To illustrate one impact of AI in KM, Rebecka says: “I am going to come back to one of my, and many KM practitioners’ pet peeves: Search. Throughout my career in KM numerous surveys across C-levels and CKOs put Search in the top three pain points, every time.

“Inefficient enterprise search tools tend to result in time wasted. Employees end up spending a lot of time searching and browsing, before giving up to ask a colleague instead. It drives frustration and stress for the employee and is a disruption for the person they call on, adding further to productivity loss. With AI-powered knowledge solutions, we are no longer solely dependent on search to find information or content – it is instead surfaced (suggested) to us, in the context of work and in whichever channel we are currently working – be it the intranet, Teams or other collaboration tools.” 

The benefits of these AI-led changes are clear to her because of previous experiences with trying to understand and encourage employee search efficiency in the workplace. “What was so frustrating to me was that we could see things like the average search term going down from 1.6 words to the 1.4 words – and it baffled me. Now with the natural language capability we can type real questions into our search engines and get the search results back so much faster.”

More intriguing is that Microsoft 365 can answer questions before we think to ask them. “You can do a search from any search box across the suite and you’ll get names and content suggested to you as soon as you start typing.”

But it is not only in search that AI helps. Rebecka says there is AI technology now integrated across solutions and platforms that “surfaces” information to “help us answer questions we did not even know to ask. It includes people, news, content and relevant sites to name a few. In other words, it encompasses both the tacit and the explicit, so it adds value across both those knowledge dimensions. It does not mean that search becomes obsolete, but it fills a gap we would otherwise overlook. Search is something we should use when we ‘know what we don’t know’. AI-powered knowledge tools help us find answers when we ‘don’t know what we don’t know’. And since it processes much bigger knowledge bodies, it will provide much better answers than we can ourselves by browsing search results and lists.” 

Humane leadership

But how do improvements like this new AI-powered technology encourage, or compliment, a different leadership style? Rebecka says: “The connection to leadership was oftentimes one-directional and company values and visions were perhaps communicated at an annual meeting or during the onboarding process but then easily forgotten.

“An important benefit of this new technology is connecting employees with leader­ship and their vision for the ­organisation, or the customers of the organisation. It ties into what we talked about earlier regarding the employee experience and how we can create engagement, a sense of belonging and sense of purpose.

“Having a bidirectional channel to leader­ship, the ability to ‘follow’ your leaders across various channels or enabling ­employees to interact directly in large town halls and participate in conversations in real time, whether physically in the room or participating remotely, makes a big difference. But it also raises the expectations on our leaders to have an open dialogue, foster transparency and be ­responsive that is new to many. Leaders can no longer ‘hide’ behind a monthly letter (e-mail) to employees but are expected to participate in the dialogue and that can be challenging but, in the end, very rewarding, as it also helps them stay relevant and engaged with their teams – it helps them learn and grow as leaders too.”

CILIP Conference

Rebecka will cover some of these topics at CILIP Conference 2023 at the Hilton Metropole in Birmingham on 12-13 July. Her insights into how to maintain the freedoms we gained during the pandemic – and increase trust and engagement at the same time – should be of interest to leaders across all the sectors of the information profession, not just those from the Knowledge Management community.

Book your place here https://cilipconference.org.uk