Episode #428: The Boss Must Become The Virtual Chatbot Alternative

In one of my other podcasts, “The Presentations Japan Series”, l talked about “Virtual Chatbots Are The End Of Civilisation”. What is the problem and what do we bosses have to do to stop this happening inside our companies? XiaoIce’s virtual chatbot accounts for sixty percent of all global human-AI interactions. There are already 660 million users and it is designed to hook us by providing the levels of human interaction we cannot get in real life. Danit Gal, an expert in AI ethics at Cambridge University says, “Users ‘trick’ themselves into thinking their emotions are being reciprocated by systems that are incapable of feelings”. This is sad.

Nippon is not immune. Pre-Covid, Japan already had legions of fans, mainly young men, waving light sticks at concerts given by the very generously proportioned, long legged, big eyed, super cute, singing idol, Hatsune Miku. Unfortunately, she isn’t real, because she is a hologram, an illusion. If some people are that desperate for human interaction, that they fall in love with virtual chatbots and holograms, what can bosses do inside their companies, to provide that sought after human interaction quotient. We spend a lot of time working under the care and supervision of bosses.

This discussion is particularly pertinent in the time of Covid, where we have been flung to the winds and don’t congregate that much in the office anymore, if at all. Our team began working from home in February 2020. We are still there. Personally I have found getting hold of people much harder than when we were all in the office. Trying to catch people by phone is a constant irritant, because it is hard to get hold of them. The speed of communication has slowed down, as you have to wait to make contact. You call they are not picking up, you leave a message. They don’t see the message, so you send an email. They don’t see the email, so it takes that extra time to communicate.

For the boss, this means that the work which needs to get done, isn’t getting worked on. The sense of time pressure goes up, as output deadlines are elongated and results production is slowed down. In this type of scenario, the already busy boss become much busier. The danger is that bosses become so focused on what they need to get done, that they lose touch with their team. When you are barely getting through all the work on your plate for that day, the additional bandwidth to check in on other people just isn’t there. Now we might be thinking, “no problem, my direct reports are keeping up close contact with their team members”.

Is this too optimistic? Probably. They are under similar time pressures to their boss. It can easily become a systemic problem across the whole organisation. It isn’t something we can just pigeonhole as a “younger person’s problem”. Humans are social animals and for the last 18 months we have become individual units, sitting at home in isolation from one another. There are people, of all ages, in our teams who need that human interaction. Do we really want to abandon them to the dubious charms and comforts of a virtual chatbot? Aren’t we sacrificing our people care responsibilities, on the altar of being super busy?

We can’t do everything, but we can do the most important things. The issue then becomes one of prioritisation. Are we sufficiently prioritising our people? We might be thinking “of course I am, what a load of rubbish”. There is truth in schedules and diaries. Just go back a week or two and take a good look at where you were spending your time? I will guarantee that viewed with the cold, hard eye of pragmatism, none of us were spending enough time for our people. Were we encouraging our direct reports to be checking in in their team? Again, the proof is in the records of meetings and team meeting minutes. The ugly truth is we were no doubt assuming they knew what to do. The other part of that ugly truth is they were probably doing just what we were doing – concentrating on their own work, head down and going hard at it.

We cannot let virtual chatbots replace the human touch. It won’t necessarily happen by itself, so we have to be proactive and make it happen. Step one is block out the time in our schedules. If it isn’t sharp elbowed in there, then it probably won’t happen. Step two is “just do it”.