Athena Peppes
Appearances
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
think through different issues the first is around accountability who is accountable for the information that your AI enabled bot gives now this might seem like a straightforward question but there was an interesting case earlier in the year of Air Canada that basically argued that the bot which had given mistaken information to one of the customers that was trying to get information around bereavement fees they argued that the bot was responsible and
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
And they had no liability to pay the money back. Now, that did not go down well. That was their kind of argument. But there's all sorts of kind of legal implications around that.
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
Yes, they did. Become a bit more human. Yeah, exactly. They did. But then you can get into a little bit more detailed questions of like, well, is it the executives that kind of approved that? Is there any responsibility with the team that designed it? What about if it was supplied from a third party? So there's like so much complexity there, right, for companies to figure out.
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
The second one's around bias. So I use these tools quite a lot because I personally think they help my productivity immensely. They save me so much time. And I just love experimenting with different things. But this is the importance of critical thinking always is I can see that they're biased and I'm sure they're getting better or at least I hope.
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
But I was writing a piece around the economics of AI and I wanted an image of an economist pondering the future of productivity.
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
Dali. I used Dali, but straight away he gave me a man with white hair. Obviously, you know, like middle-aged white man. I was like, OK. And then because I've had this experience before, I just thought, I wonder what would happen if I stopped the profession. So I could, you can prompt it to try and get different things and say, oh, give me more diverse and everything.
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
But it's like, what if I just put the word economist for nurse and straight away gave me a woman? So of course they are because they're trained on information that we've created and we all come with our own biases, right? But how do we have a responsibility as an organization to not perpetuate those biases as well if you're using those tools?
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
Then there's the data privacy issues that we've touched on as well. How do you get around that? Deepfakes, that's the fourth one. And I think that's something that's particularly concerning because there's so much synthetic media at the moment and the quality of it is amazing. One that might interest you is, have you seen the Google LM tool that now creates podcasts from articles?
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
But that's not to say that it all will be, but that also makes you think about your own job. How can you use it to do your job differently, perhaps? Or perhaps as humans, we value the fact that that was, that we all got together here and had this conversation in person. We put a greater value on this than on something that was just artificially generated. Yeah.
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
And then the fifth one is around jobs. And I think that's a huge one because it sometimes gets not mentioned very much in the light of like productivity benefits, which there are many. But I think it's better not to hide away from the conversation and to think about what would that mean for the impact on your people? Will that mean job losses? And if it does, how do you handle that?
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
What's your responsibility to upskill your people and help them understand the technology better? Yeah.
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
Yeah, it's quite diverse, I would say. I think you're right that if we look to the past, say, for instance, when smartphones and social media kind of became commonplace, there was a lot of issues around that. Maybe not necessarily on jobs, but kind of parallel issues that we could learn from.
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
And what we saw is that we were very slow, our institutions were very slow to adopt to those kind of issues and help people. Automation would be one example of that, right? Loads of jobs got automated. I think now there's a lot, the kind of jobs that will be affected are not just manual jobs, but also manual routine jobs, but also knowledge workers.
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
And perhaps that's why we are seeing much more of a discussion because there's a feeling that, oh, this is becoming a lot bigger in terms of the impact on jobs. I don't know if you can generalize about how CEOs are
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
are seeing this i think the the ceo of um clarna the payments company said that they they got rid of 1200 jobs because genitive i was helping their marketing and sales teams do things so much faster and he said actually that they can that they'll only be able to function with 2000 people i think as opposed to perhaps nearly double that now or something like that
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
But there's always the economic incentive of the thing. There's an IPO coming up.
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
So there's issues like that.
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
Yeah, and I think, you know, the things you touched on as well about the broader perspective, right? So it helps to think of this from a macroeconomic perspective. CEOs, I think, would generally think about it in the context of their organization, but the issues that come up, like you mentioned around education in the future and how do we plan for our economies, those are much bigger issues.
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
And it's not as commonplace to find CEOs that might have that vision. Arguably, some of that might come from us, right? What expectations do we have from these organizations about their responsibility to actually create jobs? Yeah. So in the economics field, there's a huge debate around the impact of this on jobs. I'm not sure there's a conclusion yet.
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
There's a bigger argument because most of the ways that they would estimate what the impact would be is based on previous waves. of change, and perhaps the data there is not a good enough predictor of what's coming in the future.
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
Well, you see the kind of challenge with doing that. There might be new jobs being created, right? There definitely will be. There are loads of philosophers now being hired by big companies to help them think through these kind of questions that might come up. So it's, yeah, it's a huge topic.
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
I just feel that as individuals, the more we understand the technology, the more we use it, the more we learn about it, the more prepared you are to influence that change as well, whether as a consumer, you know, as an employee, as a citizen as well. Yeah.
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
No, absolutely. And again, they have the same actual trade-off that the C-suite executives have, right? Because arguably there's a huge case to be made for how you use AI in the public sector, which definitely needs improvements in terms of efficiency and services that need to be provided to people. So the opportunity there is huge.
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
But then how do you kind of balance that with what it means for jobs? And arguably they have, so they have double the role to play in the sense of both balancing that as the public sector, but also in terms of the policymakers within that doing, you know, thinking about that for the whole economy.
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
Yeah, I'd say it's a huge issue, as you say, and there's like so much to think about. I think it can also feel, my thing is always how to simplify stuff, right? And because it can feel like, where do I start? I always have in my mind kind of five things to structure a conversation around this and to help
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
Well, I think for one thing, I think the whole topic of artificial intelligence definitely has more room. There's a lot of discussion around this being hype and so on. And of course, there's always a little bit of hype when something new comes into the forefront, right? So there is, but the opportunity is definitely there. It's huge. You see some companies appointing chief AI officers now.
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
into the C-suite board. So in the same way that in the past, if we look at the topic of sustainability, used to be one person doing what was called CSR back then that no one used to take seriously to now someone, whole teams focusing on how organizations can deliver on those goals. So something similar is happening with AI.
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
I think what people worry about a lot, individuals, is this idea of general artificial intelligence. So this technology being able to completely replicate what we are as humans. But there's just so much that needs to happen for us to get there that I think we won't be around ourselves to discuss that.
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
Yeah, but I think it's kind of find that balance as an individual, as a leader, as a team member, whoever you might be, whatever role or hat you might be wearing. What's next is finding that balance between making the most of the growth opportunity that is definitely there. The stuff that these technologies can do, they can just create new content in seconds. We know this.
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
But how can you make sure that you do that in a way that's forward thinking enough that you don't get caught out by some of the risks or challenges, other issues around that?
The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 11, Part 2 - Fears & Foresight of AI Adoption with Athena Peppes
Yeah, it's been a pleasure to be here. Thank you.