Dear Reader,

Sometimes the humor in the news isn't in a single story but in the way they stack up together. I was looking on Slashdot [1] the other day and saw this news item (from the Guardian):

Accenture has reportedly started tracking staff use of its AI tools and will take this into consideration when deciding on top promotions, as the consulting company tries to increase uptake of the technology by its workforce. [2]

Right under it – not further down the page, but directly after it – was an item from Financial Times:

Workplace grievances that once fit in a single email are now ballooning into 30-page documents stuffed with irrelevant historical detail, made-up legal precedents, and citations to laws from the wrong country – and UK employment lawyers say generative AI is the likely culprit. [3]

I couldn't help but notice the comical juxtaposition of one company declaring, "We all need to use more AI, and if you're not using AI, you won't get a promotion" and another company saying "all this AI is adding mounds of unnecessary paperwork and driving us crazy."

To be fair, both reports could be correct. The term "AI" has come to encapsulate a broad range of meanings, and it is accepted truth that AI could be great in some contexts and not in others. The Financial Times story about workplace grievances confines itself to a single use case, which is probably a good way to assess the benefits of AI. The new policy at Accenture doesn't appear to be about a specific AI use but is more about the company's AI Refinery toolset, which allows users to build agents, organize knowledge, and construct models.

The point seems to be that Accenture invested a lot of money in developing this toolkit, and they want to make sure their employees are using it – which makes sense, or that is, it would make sense as long as they spent sufficient time studying these tools in an actual business context to confirm that they do indeed improve productivity.

All this underscores the fact that we're making this AI thing up as we go. We're turning these tools loose on the world with the high hopes that they will meet the best-case scenarios we envision for them. And down at the personnel level, real jobs are on the line. Once the money is spent, the shareholders will expect transformation, or at least, higher profits. The org chart thus bends to conform to the belief that the expected outcome is certain.

A general understanding in contract bridge (or any other game with an element of chance) is that, if there is only one scenario in which you can win, you have to play as if that scenario describes your reality. Maybe it doesn't describe your reality, but there is no way you'll win unless you assume that it does. That seems to be the strategy playing out in the corporate world as AI mandates make their way from the board room down through the ranks. Will these companies win? Maybe, or maybe not – in the end, commerce, like contract bridge, is a game with an element of chance.

Editor in Chief, Joe Casad