AI, Productivity, and the Metrics That No Longer Work
AI, Productivity, and the Metrics That No Longer Work
Taking a break this week from serious subjects for mid-career professionals to talk about a failed theory that nevertheless made it into Fortune. Here is the link.
I don’t want to add to your already full list of things to read, but skimming it will help you to understand why we all need to put arguments like this to one side. We need to deal with our real and present challenges around the technology that is hitting us like a tsunami.
There are at least 7 reasons that I can think of that no one should take the analysis in this article seriously.
Productivity is always measured in more. More what? More stuff? More money? More with less–a pernicious slogan if ever there was one. We have never developed information-age metrics; we’re still mired in the Industrial Revolution. We need new metrics that measure sustainability, equity, and its flip side, inequality, especially when it comes to wealth. We need to talk about the quality of our work, not just the quantity.
No baseline. Companies throw technology at things without measuring those things first and then applying tech and measuring again. We’ve been doing that for years. If you are my age or even a generation younger, you remember a world where things took days, weeks or months and information flowed more slowly. Here’s a test: have you ever been bored? If so, then you remember what the world was like. Faster is not better.
The world is a completely different place; there’s more of everything including people who are employed. While we cannot go back and measure things as they were, anyone who is being honest understands that we are, in many ways, more productive than we used to be even in conventional terms. Here’s one tiny personal example: it used to take me weeks to create a presentation for the conferences I spoke at while in my analyst role. If a professional quality presentation (with the narrative and ideation being the hardest part) takes you longer than a couple of hours, go shopping for some AI-enabled presentation software.
If high speed communication, internet, software, and the interconnected world did not exist, we would not know each other. Therefore, my business–Logan Advisory Services–with its potential to add VALUE to the world would not exist. We got it up and delivering value to clients within six months, including incorporation, bank accounts, accountants, lawyers through an aggregation site, business insurance, a website, work product, recruiting associates, and buying a load of SAS software for not much money. We’ve sent our first invoice and signed our first recurring revenue contract. Multiply that by a bunch of millions in all that has been created on the back of the tech revolution. We have created new value for customers in addition to contributing to taxation systems in two countries, I might add. If that’s not productivity, then I don’t know what is.
No one knows what they were doing in absolute terms before AI–or just before the tech explosion of the early 21st century–but it certainly took a lot longer. In my non-work life I am so much more knowledgeable about things I care about because of my Kindle and my phone. How about you?
In 5 or so years the world will be unrecognizable because of AI. And of course, there will be a lot that is better and more that is worse. That's because most companies will invest without much thought to the right processes benchmarked before, to determine ROI after. It is a case of you cannot manage or show progress if you did not THINK IT THROUGH beforehand. It happens every time. See any Gartner Hype Cycle.
My relationship with my talented young Project Manager would not exist. She would not be learning. I would not be teaching her, and, more than occasionally, she would not be telling me what to do. She’s going to be in the workforce for many years and learning to use the most important new tech of the decade. Without the technology we use to work together, we wouldn't be doing this, which is the most fun and worthwhile thing I've ever done in my work life for lots of reasons. Which is also my life-life. That cannot be measured–because it is priceless.
