What AI Can’t Do for Organizations

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

AI can do a lot—and its capabilities will only increase. But there are some things only humans can do.

There’s been a deafening sense of “meh” in the American workplace for the last few years, and now we are adding to it a feeling of existential dread. Prompted by the pandemic, we moved to increasingly remote work, which while convenient has removed much of the excitement of working on teams, and now AI has arrived, bringing with it a whole host of questions and concerns for leaders and employees alike about our jobs, our value as individuals, and our ability to create and innovate.

It’s completely fair to be both excited and concerned. AI can do a lot But let’s remember, there’s a lot it can’t do, too. 

Focusing on what AI cannot do will help us understand what we as individuals and teams bring to the table and where we should focus our energy as AI takes on a bigger role in our organizations moving forward.

AI is not inherently creative or novel. 

Put a prompt into ChatGPT, and it can spit out whatever you asked for—even inherently creative things like film scripts, short stories, or sonnets—in a matter of seconds. We asked ChatGPT to write one “artistic” sentence about creativity, and it gave us this:

Like a painter's brush strokes on a canvas, creativity illuminates the world with vibrant colors and infinite possibilities.

Not bad, huh? This sentence might seem creative to a degree, but to be truly creative, you need the ability to think and make new connections. ChatGPT didn’t “think” this up on its own, nor does it write original stories when it’s asked to produce a script. It sources all the data it has access to and presents a series of words most likely to be used for the given circumstance based on that data.

That is what AI is really good at: finding patterns in data.

From those patterns, it can not only write believable sentences, it can also generate insights that may be particularly helpful for curing diseases, developing new technologies, and discovering connections between disparate inputs that we’ve not found before. But it cannot come up with anything new. It cannot create anything in the true sense of the word—in the way that humans truly can.

AI can’t collaborate. 

Humans aren’t just creative alone. We like to be creative with one another—to brainstorm and collaborate, using our collective knowledge, shared understanding, and imagination to build on each other’s ideas and come up with more innovative concepts and solutions than we can come with by ourselves. For organizations, collaboration has often (if not always) been the biggest factor in fostering innovation—a key component to our success.

AI, however, can’t collaborate with us. While AI systems can manufacture a large number of ideas quickly—giving us lists of things we can use as prompts for brainstorming—they lack the ability to understand context, and they’re greatly limited by the quality and diversity of the data they’re trained on. Without degrees of nuance and background, they can easily provide uninspired and even biased suggestions, which is unhelpful at best and harmful at worst, and certainly won’t drive the level of innovation organizations need to grow.

AI does not have soft skills.

Both of these points bring us to AI’s arguably most significant limitation: It has no “soft” skills.

AI can’t give a rousing speech or a moving performance. It can’t smile, shoot you a reassuring look, or give constructive feedback. It can’t mediate a disagreement between colleagues, read body language, or change the energy in the room. It can’t make intuitive decisions or use common sense. Simply put, it cannot understand human emotions, empathize with others, or provide meaningful interactions.

People have the unique ability to quickly understand complex situations and make decisions based on our experiences and intuition. We can recognize when someone’s in need of an encouraging word or a kind gesture. We can sense the mood in a room and make choices to influence people’s emotions in one way or another. And we can make adjustments when circumstances, attitudes, or results change—or when they need to. 

AI can do none of these things.

So, invest in your collaboration and soft skills, folks

As a society, we’ve invested heavily in STEM in both our education systems and the professional world. State governments have reduced (or eliminated, in some cases) funding for liberal arts programs, and we’ve incentivized young people to abandon the humanities in lieu of engineering, computer science, and business courses—the “hard skills.”

It bears repeating that AI can work wonders when it comes to these hard, technological skills, like machine learning, language processing, data analytics, etc., and its capabilities in that realm will only improve from here. Eventually, in the not too distant future, AI’s hard skills will outpace those of humans. 

What will our organizations need then? The things AI can’t do: the soft skills.

The more that hard skills are commoditized, the more likely it is that everything we’ve deprioritized in recent years—emotional intelligence, the arts and humanities, leadership, and people skills—will become the most important skills for advancement in the professional world.

What is your EQ level? How are your people skills? It might be time for a tune-up.