AI and… did you say… Empathy…?

In early July, I took part to an interesting research activity organized by the ACCA in Singapore (thanks to Alfred Joseph and the ACCA team), a roundtable on emotional Intelligence, involving several CFOs and senior finance leaders. My group was assigned to reflect on an interesting topic, i.e.  Emotional Intelligence and Human Machine Interaction, in a Finance and Accounting context; evaluate the possible impacts on people, and assess what Emotional Competencies accountants will need to manage or to integrate into roles and service offering. We had to pick-up among, Identity, Self-Knowledge, Adaptability, Empathy, and Influence, a variation from Daniel Goleman’s key EI components.

It was a rich discussion, we talked about AI Emotional boundaries, Virtual Reality, feeling towards machine (insecurity, resentment), having to interact, to “talk with” many more machines, machine impact on human cultural context. The results of this global study will be published in November. But I wanted to share my takeaways and thoughts as a practitioner, after similar discussions with some of my peers in Singapore.

• All of us have been exposed to increased automation, or have been involved in an organizational transformation activity to a certain degree. It is amazing how fast things have changed since the first conferences I attended about RPA in Finance, say two or three years ago; it is not about awareness anymore, change is on, excitement as well, along with questions and concerns. Off session, we discussed about our challenges to transform organizations and mindsets, how to retain and grow talents, how to drive change management, which is never easy.
• We all agreed that impacts on Humans will be or are already significant, and the perception of new technology more positive from Millenials or youngsters. But only a few of us have really been exposed to advanced technologies (AI, ML, Virtual Reality etc..) and we have difficulties to express impacts, and anticipate consequences beyond task efficiency, team re-organization, talent attraction or retention. We agree that technology can deeply influence behaviours: social networks showed it, Millenials and Digital-Natives behave differently, in the way they apprehend social interaction, communication and problem solving. But deeper and longer-term impacts on cognitive learning, social interactions or cultural consequences are difficult to conceive and to project in real life, at workplace.
• The timeline for change is blurry; a lot is already affecting our organizations and the way we operate, but Virtual Reality, AI-driven tools, even managing teams of machines still looks remote, between 5 to 10 years from now.

In such a context, Adaptability is the key word, the competency to develop and master, before Identity and Influence. But surprisingly for a discussion about Emotional Intelligence, we did not mention Empathy or Self-Knowledge. Another interesting note, we talked a lot about our teams, but less about us as Managers, how our roles and attitudes may change, as if we take as granted that we will remain at the centre of the game. Will our Management roles be identical? Are we going to manage morphing organizations, hybrid teams (i.e. Humans and Machine), new profiles of employees, like we do today?

We are probably only scratching the surface of the deep impact related to AI/ML. But, I don’t believe that Adaptability without Empathy and Self-knowledge can durably works. It should even be the essence of change management, of Management in the future. But I accept that it can be difficult to apply in everyday business life…. starting with me...

JP