'Winning with AI' Shows How to Harness the New Tech in Everyday Tasks

What is inevitable is that we are now squarely in the Age of AI; the technology is here to stay and becoming more capable every day at a furious pace. We will have to learn to live with it, and even better if we learn how to leverage it to become better at our life and work. We believe that more than any other aspect of our life, GenAI will impact how we work and the kind of jobs we do. In the words of the Chinese AI guru Kai Fu Lee: “AI is serendipity. It is here to liberate us from routine jobs, and it is here to remind us what it is that makes us human.”

By far, the biggest concern around AI is how it might impact jobs. “Is my job safe?” and “Will my children find jobs in the age of AI?” are common refrains today. This is not surprising, since AI is a cognitive technology, perhaps the first tool we have invented that mimics our brain. Thus, it has abilities and expertise that we consider uniquely human – creativity, art, writing, mathematics and coding. Unlike other technologies of the agricultural and industrial revolution, this one does not threaten to replace blue-collar manual labour, or the jobs “other people” do, but white-collar knowledge work, or the jobs “people like us” do. Thus, it ignites a primal fear of loss of livelihood, relevance and one’s place in society.

Claude Shannon, the father of Information Theory and an MIT professor, once grumpily remarked, “I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I’m rooting for the machines.” Shannon did not seem to like human beings too much, but this quote does lend credence to the same fears and questions that have resurfaced today. These questions are certainly not being asked for the first time. Every time a revolutionary new technology is unleashed, the same thought fearfully raises its head. It bothered Ned Ludd in 1779 when the spinning jenny was invented, as it threatened to take his job as a textile factory apprentice. He went and smashed a machine or two, catalysing a campaign against textile technology, and started the Luddite movement.

New-age Luddites worried about PCs and their job-destroying potential; this movement was particularly strident in India with computers being smashed by workers’ unions. We were apprehensive that computers would replace accountants, clerks, secretaries, teachers, consultants and scores of others “like us”. The reality, as it turned out, was quite different: the PC and the Internet did destroy a few jobs, but created millions more, and today we cannot imagine our life without them; the IT revolution not only created new jobs, but also catapulted India into a tech superpower. On that note, let us clarify something: “work” is different from “jobs”.

Work is generally defined as any effort or activity, physical or mental, undertaken to achieve a result or fulfil a purpose. It encompasses tasks performed for personal satisfaction, family responsibilities, volunteer activities, creative pursuits or professional outcomes. Work can be informal, unpaid and self-directed, often driven by intrinsic motivation or broader life goals rather than financial compensation. A job, on the other hand, refers specifically to paid employment, a structured role within an organization or business where an individual is compensated financially for performing defined duties. Jobs typically involve clear expectations, responsibilities, schedules and performance criteria set by an employer, emphasizing extrinsic rewards such as salary, benefits, promotions and career advancement. The key difference between work and jobs lies in their scope and motivation: work is broader, encompassing any meaningful or purposeful effort, while a job is narrower, explicitly tied to employment and financial remuneration.

Let us tackle work first. A report on AI and the future of work by Microsoft WorkLab offers some interesting revelations: More than half (57 per cent) of a corporate employee’s typical workday is devoted to communication like emails, meetings, chats and so on.1 The remaining 43 per cent is put towards actual creative tasks, and even those sometimes involve creating spreadsheets, documents or slides to present in the aforementioned meetings. No wonder that more than two-thirds of workers complained that they did not have uninterrupted focused time during their workday.

In fact, when we share this statistic with management executives and employees, we are often told this is wrong – the ratio is more like 70/30 or 80/20 in favour of non-creative to creative work. As former corporate citizens who experienced this for more than two decades before turning entrepreneurs, this resonates strongly with us. While entrepreneurs too face many struggles, our level of productivity has ratcheted up several times, unencumbered by countless meetings discussing the same old issues, similar information being presented to different people in different formats and virtually no time to do any deep thinking. As the GenAI tidal wave sweeps across industries and offices, we strongly believe that it will affect corporate work more than anything else. We often do not consider work an industry – though it is a several trillion dollar one – and confuse work with jobs. We are rightly worried about how AI will impact jobs, but tend to neglect how it will impact work.

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