AI colleagues are coming to an office near you; for some AI models, smaller is better; Europe's rushed attempt to regulate AI; inside the AI memory machine

Hurricane season tests AI weather forecasting; training dataset found to include content from popular YouTubers; the AI-powered future of coding; cost and reliability impact widespread AI adoption

Jul 19, 2024

∙ Paid

On July 9, the CEO of Lattice, a software company offering performance management and employee engagement solutions, published a blog article that began like this: “Today Lattice is making AI history. We will be the first to give digital workers official employee records in Lattice. Digital workers will be securely onboarded, trained, and assigned goals, performance metrics, appropriate systems access, and even a manager. Just as any person would be.”

After getting dogpiled on social media for three days, Lattice updated their original announcement, clarifying it “will not further pursue digital workers in the product.”

Although the announcement combined ChatGPT-speak with clumsy attempts at CEO humor, the core message it was trying to convey is very much real: we’re quickly headed for a future where AI agents work alongside human employees.

A screenshot of a Lattice org chart. A digital worker named Piper is listed as an employee. — Lattice described a future where AI workers are managed alongside people and represented on org charts.

AI is evolving from infrastructure code that makes under the hood improvements to traditional software to something more tangible that resembles the experience of interacting with a human. Chatbots are an easy example that illustrates this evolution: they began as pre-scripted software offering robotic responses to human queries, then evolved to conversational interfaces that could reply in natural language. More recently, they’ve expanded beyond text and assumed full-blown digital identities such as Meta’s AI Personas—chatbot characters based on celebrities that are designed to help you with everyday tasks or questions.

But perhaps the best way to understand AI workers is to look their adoption in back-office operations, where Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has already improved efficiency in areas like data entry, invoice processing, and compliance reporting. The parallels with RPA are instructive. Much like RPA, AI colleagues promise to bring benefits to a broad range of knowledge work, handling everything from scheduling and data analysis to customer service and creative tasks.

As the work of these AI agents becomes more visible and the models powering them become more capable, distinguishing between human and AI interactions will be challenging. Therefore, companies have a responsibility to clearly communicate when their employees or customers are interacting with AI versus humans. If they don’t, the resulting ambiguity could lead to misunderstandings, ethical concerns, and potential erosion of trust in workplace relationships.

Lattice’s attempt to implement these transparency measures early, such as the labeling of AI workers and their role in the organization, is commendable but clearly ill-timed and badly delivered. By rushing to “make AI history”, Lattice’s announcement seemed to casually ignore concerns of job displacement, data privacy, or the quality of AI-generated work. Because people fear what they cannot understand, they react negatively when change is imposed on them, something that Lattice should’ve anticipated given HR is their bread and butter.

So the lesson that I hope Lattice and other companies keen to dabble in agentic AI draw from this blunder is to always put people before PR; and if you must PR, you can start simple, from highlighting training programs to help employees adapt to working alongside AI to launching educational initiatives that help consumers make use of the technology—and grow from there.

The future of work is not about brute-forcing AI among humans, but about creating an environment where both can thrive.

And now, here are the week’s news:

❤️Computer loves

Our top news picks for the week - your essential reading from the world of AI

⚙️Computer does

AI in the wild: how artificial intelligence is used across industry, from the internet, social media, and retail to transportation, healthcare, banking, and more

TechCrunch: Proton launches ‘privacy-first’ AI writing assistant for email that runs on-device
TechCrunch: Spotify adds a Spanish-speaking AI DJ, ‘Livi’
WSJ: What Could Conquer the Superweeds? Bayer and Others Turn to AI
Fortune: Tinder will use AI to help you pick your best profile picture
Washington Post: Rep. Wexton, confronting degenerative disease, finds her voice through AI
TechCrunch: Bird Buddy’s new AI feature lets people name and identify individual birds
TechCrunch: Deezer chases Spotify and Amazon Music with its own AI playlist generator
TechCrunch: Presti is using GenAI to replace costly furniture industry photo shoots

🧑‍🎓Computer learns

Interesting trends and developments from various AI fields, companies and people

Keep reading with a 7-day free trial

Subscribe to Computerspeak by Alexandru Voica to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.