Can we please stop talking about replacing employees with AI?

One online retailer recently underwent an AI transformation after realizing they no longer needed to hire expensive local labor to provide customer support. They split customer support into AI bots acting as first-tier support and an overseas team acting as second-tier support where AI can escalate calls. Operational costs plummeted, but so did the quality of service and sales.

This is just one example of the conversation that is trending in every boardroom, event, and trade conference. More than anything, executives want to know when they can replace employees who need benefits, time off, mental health programs, promotions, and professional development with an army of AI bots. And we need to be having this conversation.

Those being laid off include customer support, software developers, copywriters, content creators, marketing managers, forklift operators and drivers. The latest addition to this dying list is the CEO, he said. The New York TimesBut I’m not too worried about this because it’s still us, the CEOs, who decide who we want to replace with AI.

Augment, not replace

On behalf of all CEOs, I acknowledge that 75-90% of routine tasks can be fully automated by AI. All tasks involving gathering information, analyzing, and recommending decisions to maximize outcomes can be performed by AI better than a human CEO. And the remaining 10-25% are important and unique to a CEO as a leader. These include empathy, accountability, vision, inspiration, etc.

I would like to spend 10-25% of my time on this and less on other things. If I still have time left, I would be happy to use it to develop a deeper appreciation for my workplace and team.

As a software engineer, I share responsibilities in my daily work. I’m sure most other jobs do the same (apart from the awful ones that shouldn’t exist). Most employees would definitely prefer to spend more time on creative, human work, have more flexibility, and enjoy more time off. That’s why we need AI, not to replace us.

Instead of replacing employees with AI, here are three actions CEOs and organizational leaders can take.

Reduce workload and work weeks

Burnout is only getting worse, leading to lower productivity and higher employee turnover. AI increases work efficiency and saves employees hours in their day. It reduces the workload of each employee, saving them hours a week to improve their lives and their loyalty to the company, without sacrificing productivity.

You can do this by prioritizing the use of co-pilot-style AI tools that make your employees more productive but don’t try to completely replace them. Resist the temptation to replace junior employees with tools like Devin, the much-hyped world’s first fully autonomous AI software engineer. Without a pipeline of junior employees, you’ll never have truly talented senior employees.

Refocus responsibility

With AI taking over mundane, repetitive tasks, your team will have more room for creative, human work. Change organizational structures and job descriptions to make room for strategic, relationship-driven work that AI can’t do as well as humans. With fewer to-do lists for employees, leaders and managers can shift their focus to challenging and developing employees in other, more valuable areas, like relationship building and soft skills.

AI can help here too, but not in the way you might think. Rather than replacing humans, AI can derive insights (from the data most companies already have) that can lead to recruiting and developing the right talent for the job. Software used to identify the key soft skills that lead to success in a particular role can be extremely valuable to both employers and employees. Ultimately, it leads to improved job performance. and Satisfaction leads to improved morale and revenue, so it’s a win-win.

Maintain competitive compensation

Reducing workload while maintaining or increasing salary seems like a contradiction. Software improvements can and should lead to reduced operational costs, but not at the expense of your team. Leveraging AI to benchmark your company’s compensation can uncover trends and build more competitive compensation packages for your employees. A manageable workload combined with increased time off can improve time to hire, quality of hire, productivity, and performance.

While salary will always be a major part of employee compensation, companies are wise to consider intangible reward factors beyond just money that lead to greater employee satisfaction and retention. The most common intangible factors are job flexibility, autonomy, and a healthy work environment. Of course, this depends on who you hire. As long as it’s a human and not a bot, leveraging AI to harness soft skill capabilities will create a better team and overall work culture.

Where do we go from here?

Is using AI to augment rather than replace employees such a lofty goal that shareholder value-driven companies cannot do because they will be punished by the stock market for not being aggressive enough in optimizing resources? Perhaps that will be the market impulse.

But one of the few aspects of being a CEO that AI cannot replace is leadership. Great leaders know that for an organization to survive, talent cannot be replaced. AI should help employees exponentially become more valuable to the company by freeing up more time for creative productivity, and help the company become more valuable to employees by improving their lives.

I don’t see this approach being widely adopted, as some CEOs are driven solely by the stock market (and could easily be replaced by AI). Capitalism is not known for prioritizing improving the lives of people other than shareholders. This is where governments need to step in and provide clear guidelines on how AI should and shouldn’t be used to improve lives.

The race to replace human workers with AI must stop, and instead the discussion should be about how AI can make workers more productive and improve their lives.

Gershon Goren is the founder and CEO of Cangrade.