You and Your Digital Assistant

Embracing change, lifelong learning, and purpose-driven collaboration.

On November 30, 2022, ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) was released. Almost instantaneously, it became a global phenomenon and generated huge amounts of excitement, doubt and fear about artificial intelligence (AI) across the spectrum of people in all fields and industries.

There is consensus that the future of work will look drastically different from today due to AI. The debate is whether AI will solve some of the biggest challenges for human beings or if it will become an existential threat to mankind.

While some of us are familiar with the quote “history is a vast early warning system” by Norman Cousins, we can interpret this with a much more positive perspective for technological advances.

If we time-travel back to the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, in the early morning of June 26, 1974, we would have witnessed the purchase of a Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum as the first Universal Product Code (UPC) was scanned at checkout. While the event may not have generated as much sensation as ChatGPT did in 2022, we should not underappreciate the impact of the UPC on the modern economy it created — a globally adopted standard unique identifier for everything we make.

Society might have had a higher level of anxiety back then if people thought about how UPCs coupled with widespread use of personal computers would automate tasks and replace many of the manual labors across the industries. Fortunately, society did not overhype or overreact to the human impact, and we gave room for UPC-enabled automation to evolve into digital assistants across industry, guided by economic opportunities. Yes, some jobs were replaced, but automation also created new categories of business opportunities and new jobs that did not exist before. Economic output increased and living standards improved.

Driven by technological advances and economics, AI capabilities like ChatGPT will transform knowledge-based works. While it will replace some knowledge-based jobs, it will offer new opportunities for others and help humans discover better solutions for the health and well-being of people and society.

The concept of AI started in the 1950s. While there were other well-known demonstrations of AI in the past, I became personally passionate about the technology in February 2011, when IBM released Watson, an AI-based computer system that won the TV game show Jeopardy against two of the most successful human players of all time.

I watched the game on TV, and it had a profound impact on me as a biologist. In fact, it was one of the motivating factors for me to change careers, leaving R&D and joining IT to use big data and AI to address some of the crucial agricultural challenges of the time. That career change eventually led to where I am today, leading digital transformation for PepsiCo R&D. In this role, I am responsible for adopting big-data technologies and AI to discover, develop and deliver new food and beverage products that are better for consumers and reduce environmental impact. As I reflect on my personal journey, here are my thoughts about how to prepare for the future of work when AI is pervasive:

Don’t Fight, AI Will Be a Part of Your Professional Life

In fact, AI is everywhere already. It recommends music and movies to you, it creates photo collages of your favorite moments on your smartphone, it helps you navigate through daily traffic, it gives us better answers when we search content on the internet, and it might even be helping you type faster with fewer typos. It is safe to assume that AI will be embedded in every app we use, at home or at work.

Like any technology, AI has its own limitations. While AI is good at processing a large amount of data for specific outcomes based on pre-training, humans are far more creative at dealing with unknowns, connecting dots and processing information with context in multiple dimensions. Even the best AI algorithms give silly answers sometimes.

The future of work will be based on the partnership between humans and AI while AI plays the role of an intelligent assistant.

Be a Lifelong Learner and Embrace AI Like Any Other Technology or Change

I was proud and confident, maybe a little arrogant, when I graduated at the age of 19 from a top university in China in the mid-’80s. China was poor and underdeveloped, and only 2-3 percent of young people got the opportunity to attend college. Naturally, I did not fully appreciate the departing advice when our dean told us at our graduation ceremony, “All you have learned is how to learn.” Looking back, that was exactly the advice I needed, and today, we look to hire people who have the desire and capability to learn because we know the jobs they are hired for will evolve in a few years, sometimes in a few months. Only learners will thrive in the workplace of the future.

Be a Passion-Driven Specialist in Your Own Field and Learn How to Work with AI Specialists

That said, you do not really have to learn programming or how to train an AI computer model, but you do need to learn how to work with people who have those skills.

AI specialists need your domain expertise as well. AI makes predictions based on the data it has access to, and it often needs human experts to determine if the prediction is right or wrong, very much like how we teach a toddler how to speak, walk or react to things.

Think about the problems you want to solve and identify what data you would need to solve the problem yourself. Collect and provide data to your data scientist colleagues who can train AI models to become your digital assistant.

Your digital assistant will be extremely helpful and won’t even compete with you for credit.

The Competitive Advantage of Your Business is Your Data, Not AI Models

As a business leader, you need to reassess your core capabilities, unique assets and organizational culture to prepare for the future of work.

To ready your organization for AI, you must treat data as your most valued asset. Your data is unique, and AI models are commodities. With quality data, there are plenty of external partners that can help develop the AI models to understand your customers better, to improve your operational efficiency and to achieve superior profit margin.

Creating a new data-focused culture is probably the most difficult and important shift of any company. The most senior leaders of an organization must have a general understanding of the relationship between data and AI models. You need to hire or groom talented people who have both business and data acumen, and you will need to invest in infrastructure and digital solutions to collect, store and share data more seamlessly across the organization.

Drink Our Own Pepsi at PepsiCo

PepsiCo is a global food and beverage company. Our products are consumed worldwide over a billion times every single day. We feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to constantly improve our products to meet consumer needs and to improve our environmental impact. AI is a critical tool for us: It’s shaping our business across our entire value chain. Which is exactly why we need to leverage AI and do so responsibly.

With generative AI, we’re scaling this technology responsibly — using it where we see an upside for our people and our company and in accordance with our Responsible AI framework to mitigate risk. We consider all stakeholder perspectives when it comes to identifying the right problems for AI to solve. Some of the value cases might include reducing the use of added sugars, sodium, saturated fat or plastics in our products and packages. These value cases help our stakeholders and employees to recognize and embrace the value that AI can offer.

At the same time, we have educational programs to increase the digital acumen of our employees so they can acquire new skills and learn how to work with AI to be more productive and creative. We’ve also stood up a rigorous internal process to govern our use of AI to ensure we are always deploying it responsibly.

We are confident that people of our future organization will be even more purpose-driven with more fun at work, supported by the help of important digital solutions.

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This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of In the Lead magazine, from Stillman School of Business’s Department of Management and the Buccino Leadership Institute. The bi-annual magazine focuses on leadership perspectives from the field of health care, with content that is curated from leaders across the industry who share lessons learned from real-world experiences.

Categories: Business, Science and Technology