Can we please stop talking about replacing employees with AI?

An online retailer recently underwent an AI transformation after it realized it no longer needed to employ an expensive local workforce to provide customer support. They split their customer support between AI bots serving as the first tier of support and an offshore team to which AI could escalate calls, functioning as a second tier of support. Its operational costs dropped precipitously, but so did the quality of service and sales.

This is just one example of the trendiest conversation in every boardroom, event and trade conference. More than anything, executives want to know when they can finally replace employees who require benefits, vacations, mental health programs, promotions and professional development and replace them with an army of AI bots. And we need to talk about this.

The chopping block includes roles like customer support, software developers, copywriters and content creators, marketing managers, forklift operators, drivers and more. The latest edition to this extinction list is no less than the CEO, says The New York Times. I’m less concerned about this, though, because we CEOs are still the ones deciding who gets replaced by AI.

Let’s augment, not replace

On behalf of all CEOs, I’ll admit that 75 to 90% of our day-to-day work is fully automatable by AI. Every task that involves collecting information, analyzing it and recommending decisions to maximize outcomes, AI can do better than a human CEO. Then there is the remaining 10 to 25%, and it’s crucial and unique to who a CEO is as a leader. It includes empathy, accountability, vision and inspiration to name a few.

I’d love to spend more time doing this 10 to 25% and less of everything else. If I still have more time left, I will gladly dedicate that to appreciating my workplace and team even more.

As a software engineer, I have split responsibilities in my daily tasks. I do not doubt that most other jobs — barring some horrible ones that should not exist — do too. Most employees would certainly appreciate spending more time on creative and human tasks, having more flexibility and enjoying more time off. This is what we need AI for, not to replace us. 

Here are 3 actions CEOs and organizational leaders should be taking instead of replacing employees with AI.

Reduce workloads and work weeks

Burnout is only getting worse, driving down productivity and increasing turnover. AI is increasing workforce efficiency, giving employees hours back in their day. Reduce the workload of each employee and give them time back in their week to improve their lives and their loyalty to your company, without sacrificing output.

This can be achieved by prioritizing the use of co-pilot style AI tools — the type that make employees more productive but don’t attempt to take over completely. Resist the temptation to replace even junior employees with tools such as the much hyped Devin, the world’s first fully autonomous AI software engineer. Without a pipeline of junior employees, you will never have truly competent senior employees.

Refocus responsibilities

With mundane, repetitive tasks taken over by AI, your team will have more room for creative, human work. Shift your organizational structure and job descriptions to open up room for the strategic, relationship-oriented work that AI just can’t do as well as a human. With less on employees’ to do lists, leaders and managers can shift their focus to challenging and developing them in other more valuable areas, such as building relationships and soft skills. 

AI can help here, too, but not in the way you may think. Rather than replacing humans, it can unlock insights (from data most companies already have) that lead to hiring and nurturing the right humans for the job. Software used to identify the important soft skills that lead to success in specific roles can be extremely valuable for both employers and employees. Ultimately, improvements in job performance and satisfaction will boost morale and your bottom line — a win-win. 

Maintain competitive compensation

Reducing work and maintaining or even increasing pay sounds paradoxical. And while software improvements can and should lead to operational savings, it shouldn’t be at the expense of your team. Leveraging AI to benchmark your company’s compensation can be used to uncover trends to build more competitive compensation packages for your employees. Paired with manageable workloads and more time off, you’ll see a better time-to-hire, quality of hire, productivity and performance.

Pay will always be a big part of employee compensation, but companies would be smart to consider less tangible compensation factors that lead to happier people and better retention than money alone. Among these top non-tangibles are work flexibility, autonomy and a healthy work environment. This of course comes down to who you choose to hire. As long as that’s humans and not bots, using AI to help tap into soft skill competencies will shape a better team and overall work culture.

Where we go from here

Is using AI to augment instead of replace employees too lofty of a goal? Is this something shareholder value-driven corporations cannot afford to do because they will be punished by the stock market for not being aggressive enough in resource optimization? That will probably be the market impulse. 

But, here is one of the few aspects of being a CEO that cannot be replaced by AI: Leadership. A good leader knows that for any organization to survive, people cannot be replaced. AI should instead help make employees exponentially more valuable to their companies by spending more time on creative productivity, and for companies to become more valuable to employees by improving their lives.

Since some CEOs are driven only by the stock market (and yes, they can easily be replaced by AI), I don’t expect this approach to be widely adopted. Capitalism is not known for prioritizing improving the lives of anyone other than shareholders. This is where the government needs to step in and give us clear guidelines for how AI should and should not be used to improve lives.

The race to replace human employees with AI has to stop. Instead, we should discuss how AI can make employees more productive and improve their lives.

 Gershon Goren is founder and CEO of Cangrade.