The meaning of ‘team’ has already changed

The meaning of 'team' in 2024 has radically changed.

Collaboration, motivation and delegation - they are all still highly critical skills - but the context in which they are applied has expanded beyond human colleagues, to include a selection genAI 'collaborators'.

Is this really happening at scale today? It's tempting to think it's a case of 'the future is here just not evenly distributed', but that would be underestimating the growing waves already crashing on the shore.

Let's take two examples.

According to Bain, “40% of pharma companies are including expected savings from generative AI in their 2024 budgets”. That's way beyond early adoption.

Here at 55BirchStreet, a boutique change management consultancy, genAI is already one of our most valued colleagues.

I'm making a distinction between using a relational interface, like ChatGPT or our own Navar.ai, and a transactional interface like MidJourney.

It's well accepted that one of the best ways to get the most out of ChatGPT is to treat it like a super smart intern. Which means it's genuinely more like interacting with a human colleague than a Powerpoint deck or Excel spreadsheet.

Is this a bad thing? Not by any means, it's liberating and transformative, especially for smaller organisations that don't have the resources to hire and fire at will or appoint McKinsey or Bain.

But it will be very different. Microsoft recently released a research paper presenting 'AutoDev': an automated AI-driven development framework, in which human developers are relegated to the role of mere supervisors of artificial intelligence doing all of the actual software engineering work.

As described on Vulcan Post this week, "instead of writing code, human developers would become spectators to the work of AI, interjecting whenever deemed necessary. It’s really more akin to a management role, where you work with a team of people, guiding them towards the goals set for a project."

One of the key points from the article that really stood out out to me was "if you’re not an effective supervisor, instructing machines to do the right things, your value in most companies may go down and not up, despite your highly specialised knowledge."

So the whole concept of 'team' has changed - and those that lean in to this and understand how to leverage genAI will benefit from a huge boost in productivity - and get to stay competitive in a hyper dynamic market.

There are headlines about redundancies as a consequence of genAI, but also public statements like the one from Sanofi's CEO: "We have no objective to reduce the number of people... we have a big objective to increase productivity, and we have an even bigger objective to establish more insights that can lead to more valuable delivery of healthcare for patients."

GenAI doesn't need to mean less humans - but it does mean working and thinking differently.