There's no AI without the human

I've seen a number of articles and programmes advertised recently that promise an AI-first mindset or approach. I'm sure they're all well-meaning and - if we're being honest - trying to play on the fact that senior leaders think that 'AI-first' is the answer to all their problems.

However, it's not and never will be, unless of course you are running an entirely autonomous business, devoid of humans. Yet, even then, it still needs someone to programme the machine.

I'm not advocating that organisations don't experiment with AI or teach their people how to get the most value out of it. However, having an AI-first mindset without first having a human-first one is like buying a state-of-the-art coffee machine for an office where nobody talks to each other. Impressive. Expensive. And it changes absolutely nothing about the culture.

AI, in every form it currently takes, is trained on human knowledge, human language and human behaviour. The quality of what comes out is entirely dependent on the quality of what goes in. Which means organisations with poor communication, siloed thinking and disengaged employees will simply produce poor AI outputs faster.

Congratulations on the efficiency.

The irony is almost too good. Leaders who've spent years underinvesting in their people - their emotional intelligence, their ability to collaborate, the time to be creative - are now being sold an 'AI-first' mindset. As if the machine will compensate for the human work they never did.

It won't.

The businesses that will genuinely benefit from AI are the ones that have already built cultures where people think critically, share knowledge freely and trust each other enough to experiment and fail. Those cultures don't need an AI-first mindset. They already have the conditions in which AI can thrive.

What every business actually needs is a human-first mindset. Not as a soft, feel-good alternative to AI adoption, but as its essential prerequisite. Invest in your people's thinking, their communication, their capacity to learn, and then AI will follow.

'AI-first' will, like so many management trends before it, quietly disappear from conference agendas once leaders realise it was never the answer to the question they were actually asking.

That question, if you're interested, was always this, ‘How do we build an organisation that people want to work in which produces consistent results?’

That's a human, not a technology question.

It deserves a human answer.