We know what a coworker is. But what's a machine coworker? Would it mean robots taking over jobs and artificial intelligence making cold, calculated decisions? The reality could be a lot more human-friendly: digital tools that support, rather than replace, their squishy biological colleagues. Leading organizations are moving beyond just automating rote tasks into an era of augmenting human intelligence with machines. Tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot are shaking the foundations of how we think about work.
As soon as we shift from a competitive mindset to a collaborative one, we unlock a powerful way of thinking that has the potential to change the experience of work for the better. Explore the future of work in the digital era and imagine a workplace where machines deal with the boring stuff so you can focus on what's important.
How do we conceive of, coordinate, and partner with machine coworkers? What kind of work best suits the union of machines and humans? And what could we create if we had more 'human' capacity in our organizations?
• A new way to think about machines in business: 'machine coworkers'
• The connection between thinking styles and machine coworkers
• Current digital capabilities which map to human thinking styles
• Practical tools for creating machine coworkers, like conversational AI (ChatGPT), API integration, low/no-code and automation tools
• How robotic process automation, machine learning, and related tech trends enable 'machine coworkers'
• The relationship of AI and quantum computing to the next generations of machine coworkers; what it means for jobs, and the nature of human work
(NOTE UPDATED TIME: 11a PT/2p ET)
MJ Petroni
Cyborg Anthropologist and Chief Exponential Officer, Causeit, Inc.
A cyborg anthropologist (!), MJ helps us see not just how we shape technologies but how they are re-shaping us.
They help organizations increase their Digital Fluency in preparation for future technologies, attending not just to tools but also the thinking, skills, data, and business models which comprise new value creation.
MJ's work focuses on raising the lowest common denominator of Digital Fluency for individuals, teams, and entire organizations.