Table of contents
Callum Borchers wrote a great piece in The Wall Street Journal on how to deal with employers monitoring AI use at work.
The broader point: yuck.
There is a much better way to deliver organizational performance:
- Clear values, deeply and universally enforced, so colleagues know what good looks like.
- Unyielding commitment to communication, so everyone knows how and when to get the information they need, and how to make decisions that stick.
- Rabid focus on alignment, so everyone knows where we want to go and how each of us and our teams contribute to that. This has always been important, but it’s 10X more important now with the explosion of AI-generated content. Alignment systems need to help filter and consolidate. Writers raising the quality bar on what they send is necessary, but not sufficient.
As for AI usage in particular: I deeply believe that individual monitoring does more harm than good.
Want to understand and improve AI ROI, both outcomes and cost effectiveness? Make sure 1 through 3 are in place, then add a fourth: team-level measurement of AI adoption and results. That way, managers and their teams can have a data-based conversation about whether they’re achieving what they set out to achieve.
Real change and improvement comes person to person.
