My core thesis about AI in the workplace is that corporate-led AI initiatives fail to truly transform knowledge work, and that real transformation instead comes from individual workers finding and using AI tools on their own. One of the reasons for this is outside observers can only see a small subset of a knowledge worker’s true work. (I’m calling that subset “20%” in this post, but that’s an arbitrary number I’m using to represent the concept.) An outsider can only see the results and outputs of the work: emails, chats, documents, deliverables, app usage, meetings attended (and transcripts), etc.
The other 80%, (arguably the “real” knowledge work), lives in workers’ heads: Their reasoning behind decisions, the pattern recognition based on years of experience, their thinking process which isn’t something that can be written down, etc.