THE NINE WINS TWO AXIOM AWARDS

PHIL SIMON

Award-winning author, dynamic keynote speaker, trusted advisor, & workplace tech expert 

THE WORLD’S FOREMOST INDEPENDENT WORKPLACE COLLABORATION AND TECH EXPERT

Proceed With Caution: The Promise and Peril of AI in the Workplace

Speaking Topics

Proceed With Caution: The Promise and Peril of AI in the Workplace

Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.

—Melvin Kranzberg

30-second Pitch

Generative AI is all the rage, but how can we balance its pros and cons in the workplace?

Overview

For decades, AI has fascinated tech leaders, academics, management gurus, policymakers, and think tanks. Despite their differing viewpoints, both prophets and naysayers have asked the same fundamental question: When will it arrive in earnest?

As it turns out, the answer was November 30, 2022. On that day, OpenAI publicly released a souped-up version of ChatGPT, a previously obscure text-generation tool. Its underlying engine represented a quantum leap over its predecessor—and it went viral. Within a mere five days, more than one million people had signed up.

And like that, the world had shifted. Google’s management declared an internal code red. Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce, Amazon, and scores of other software vendors quickly began incorporating AI into their wares. The market cap of chipmaker Nvidia surpassed $1 trillion and then twice as much. Technical terms such as natural language processing, prompt engineering, and large language models entered the zeitgeist.

Predicting what comes next is impossible, but generative AI will only become vastly more powerful in the coming years. Society is clearly experiencing a Promethean moment, and no aspect will remain unaffected.

The workplace will probably experience the most profound changes. This new crop of tools promises to improve employee productivity, save firms’ payroll, combat labor shortages, discover hidden insights, and much more. At the same time, though, the significant perils around their transparency, legality, security, privacy, and inability to separate fact from fiction should give any responsible person pause.

In this talk rife with case studies, data, and example, I cut through the considerable AI bullshit. I offer a much-needed balanced viewpoint to the dizzying hype around these newfangled tchotchkes. I explain why that firms should tread lightly when adopting rapidly evolving tools generative AI tools that even their creators don’t fully understand.

What Attendees Will Learn

In this talk, I answer the following questions:

  • What are the major benefits of generative AI?
  • What are the different buckets of AI tools?
  • Which specific tools seem to be the most promising?
  • What lessons have early adopters learned?
  • What are the inherent downsides and limitations of generative AI at work?
  • How can organizations maximize its pros while minimizing its cons?
  • Where do we go from here?

And more.

Book Me

Like what you’ve read so far? Great. Click on the button below, fill out the form, and we’re on our way.