Cleve Gibbon

The digital workforce is on the cusp of a revolution, an exhilarating fusion of human and artificial intelligence (AI) agents. This transformative wave promises to be nothing short of spectacular, yet it also poses a daunting challenge for those unprepared. I confess, the pace of change is staggering, particularly due to:

• The synergistic dynamism between Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Automation (AiA).
• The rapid and widespread adoption of AiA by knowledge workers.
• The significant influence of AiA reshaping our digital workforce.

In a recent discourse with Lex Fridman, Sam Altman peeled away layers from the complexities of workforce transformation, diving into the realm of AI agents. Despite the turbulence surrounding OpenAI, Altman highlighted that GPT-5 would pioneer the widespread creation of AI agents, setting off a domino effect in the industry. What doors will this open for the digital workforce?

Flash Forward:

Picture a future where AI agents are integral to your team, taking on tasks and assigning them – not just to other AIs but to humans as well. With GPT-5’s advent, these agents are poised to undertake certain tasks autonomously, marking a significant leap in AI’s capacity to operate independently of human oversight. It will begin with essential, straightforward tasks and gradually expand to a broader functional spectrum, encompassing various interconnected modalities such as text, speech, vision, and video.

And what value will this add to knowledge workers today? In marketing, AI agents will manage data analysis, report creation, email sorting, programming, and even orchestrating marketing strategies, bestowing the invaluable gift of time. But what actions must we take – or avoid – to leverage this gift effectively?

Stop Overfocusing on Tech Innovations:

While staying updated is crucial, avoid becoming consumed by technological advances unless you’re in product development. The race for the latest model or parameter count is a distraction for consumers of AiA.

Start Dissecting Your Workday:

Deconstruct your activities into distinct tasks. AI agents will substitute tasks, not positions, but ignorance of your own workflows could leave you vulnerable to displacement.

Maintain Digital Workforce Expansion:

For organizations, continue the push for digital integration. This past decade has seen immense digital transformation – it’s time to literally digitize human roles. Understanding and documenting workflows are imperative, as is investing in AiA literacy for your workforce.

Though these suggestions may seem straightforward, their implementation is what distinguishes pioneers from stragglers in this AI-driven era.

A successful company will at start the day with valuable information.  After completing a bunch of tasks, that company ends the day with even more valuable information.  And from valuable information comes profit and growth.

Today, the digital workforce is growing to take on more connected and complex tasks. And with knowledge workers are applying artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligent automation (IA), or AiA, to complete tasks in their day to day, digital task-based workforce is growing at exponential rates.

Task is the unit of work

So envision a workforce where the majority of tasks are digital. A massive ecosystem of small to medium sized connected tasks. Traditionally, knowledge workers spearheaded these tasks. It is their job to complete these tasks by leveraging their expertise across various domains. However, as AiA capabilities grow, this workload is being shared. The digital workforce is morphing into a landscape with a harmonious blend of human intellect and machine efficiency. This partnership has not only accelerated task completion by the digital workforce but also introduced innovative solutions to complex challenges.

Looking ahead to AI Agents

Within a task-based workforce, distinguishing between tasks completed by humans or machines becomes less relevant. But AiA enabled humans are the next first important step towards this reality. That requires people to get comfortable working with AI agents now. And the curious will lead the way.

As the digital workforce matures, humans will cede more control to AI agents. Trusting them with more and more tasks and shifting into a partnering relationships with smart capable AI agents with experience and expertise under their belt. And of course, in some cases the AI agents will lead with humans in support. We’re not there yet, but it’s only a matter of time, and only for jobs we’d consider simple fit for machines. But for now, test ahead, and start learning how AI agents can help you in your day to day.

Knowledge workers use their intellectual skills to create, process, and share information. Scientists, architects, engineers, lawyers, teachers, analysts, planners, and software developers are just a few examples of knowledge workers that think for a living.  They are key contributors to innovation and problem-solving in various industries, leveraging their expertise to drive decisions and strategies.

However, the role and responsibilities of knowledge workers is evolving fast with the accelerated adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligent automation (IA) – AiA – into future digital workforce.

We’ve heard that 50% of knowledge workers have used AiA in some form or other, directly or indirectly. Moreover, that number increases to over 90% within marketing and advertising.  Interestingly, this usage is not driven by corporate policy.  It’s more self-taught and home schooled.  Nevertheless, AiA usage is on the rise.

Knowledge Workers in Marketing and Advertising

In marketing, knowledge workers craft messages that resonate with audiences for advertising outcomes. These creatives, from copywriters and designers to strategists and analysts, harness their expertise to develop campaigns that captivate and persuade. As the intelligence age advances, AiA is transforming knowledge worker roles and responsibilities, amplifying creativity and efficiency.

Let’s be clear here, AiA’s influence is profound across the end-2-end creative process.  We are automating routine tasks. Prioritizing the best use cases for specific AI tools from analyzing consumer data and predicting trends to generating intelligent outputs to inform targeted marketing strategies. This enables marketers to craft personalized campaigns that speak directly to individual preferences, significantly enhancing engagement and conversion rates.

Now an advertising agency might employ AI to generate multiple versions of an advertisement, each tailored to different audience segments based on online behavior and preferences. But that’s a lot of additional content.  However, the ambition is to streamline the creative process so that each ad variation is optimized for maximum impact.  It also shifts the certain responsibilities of knowledge workers from creator to curator in the creative process.  And all this what-if ad impact analysis is done at design time, before the ad is activated, if at all.  Yet again adding review and approve responsibilities to the knowledge worker. 

And AiA adoption is not a given

Adoption is critical for sustainable change.  HR departments are in the people trenches fielding the inevitable structural changes to digital workforce of the future. Here are a couple of major and minor organizational AI trends:

Major Trend	Minor Trend
Investment increasing	Confidence in right AiA investment bets
Likelihood of people replacement	Employee support for change
Workforce transformation	Expertise for transformation

Basically, you hear a lot noise about the major trends and less about the minor trends. However, we need to pay more attention to the minors to bring favorable outcomes for the majors, increasing AiA adoption across the organization.

I’ve always been interested in getting things done (GTD). Both professionally and personally. Being productive with a focus on the execution side is important, but not without embracing the rise of intelligence in the workplace.

Right now, Intelligent Automation (IA) has my professional focus.  To drive better client outcomes by supporting knowledge workers you must bring that right blend of methodology and technology.  And you guessed it, AI is that technology making the difference today.  AI amplifies the impact of IA.  AiA, the synergy of AI and IA has intelligence at the center of everything.

    

The Rise of the Digital Workforce

The digital workforce is predominantly made up of human workers. However, AiA will add more and more automated processes, increasing the size of digital workforce.  But more importantly, the shape and structure of the digital workforce will change significantly and permanently.  And the role of humans within the digital workforce will be even more critical.  We have officially entered the future of work discovery phase.  No one knows what that digitial workforce mix will be.  We are all learning together.

However, ignorance is no excuse.  What we do know is that intelligent knowledge workers, those that can work with AiA, will have more opportunities within the shifting and growing digital workforce, than those that can’t. 

AiA gifts knowledge workers with time to perform more human-centric tasks.  By delegating the manual and mundane to machines, we can embrace the creative and innovative to drive intelligent outcomes for others. 

So, where are we today?

Every business is different.  Culture, strategy, talent, operations, innovation, data, technology, just to name a few, and their inter-dependencies, define an organization.

However, the race is to digitize everything, everywhere, all at once, and intelligently.   Do you know what you do?  Are your processes undocumented, documented, automated, and/or integrated?  What’s your mix? Is your scope internal, external, with or without partners? And your data, who owns it?  How do you share, secure, syndicate, sanitize, and simplify it?  Do you know how to monetize what you have?  Have you separated what you sell from effort required to deliver it?

There are just a few questions to address before you can scale your business with AiA.

And the next step is…

Shared awareness.  We are in the intelligence revolution. Steam, mass production, and digital are industrial revolutions that have been and gone.  Now the transformation towards intelligent connected systems, fueled by data, powered by machines, and directed by humans is in full swing. Our forward-thinking leaders are placing big bets in AiA with the clear understanding that the intelligence landscape is critical to future growth and survival.

So, empowered execution follows shared awareness.  Those at the tip of shift have started executing, but not underestimate the amount of effort it requires to reach shared awareness.  And that’s where most of us are playing now.

As the calendar flipped to 2024, I found myself wanting more. After a transformative decade at WPP. A period marked by growth, learning, and remarkable achievements. I decided it was time for a change. This decision wasn’t made lightly. It was the culmination of introspection and a desire for new challenges. Thus, I bid farewell to WPP and took a well-deserved sabbatical to recharge and refocus. I’m now at Omnicom with a focus on technology, workloads and AI.

WPP

My journey with WPP started with a bang in Apr 2014. Our company, Cognifide, was acquired by WPP under the Wunderman OpCo. Wunderman was undergoing massive digital transformation. Cognifide’s role within WPP was to build owned experience platforms for its clients. Many clients. Ford, Investec, ColPal, EY, HSBC, Dell, Herman Miller, Coutts, Barclays, Unilever, Shell, etc. We delivered hundreds of digital platforms during my time at WPP. Then Wunderman became Wunderman Thompson after it merged with JWT, and now it’s VML. I left WPP after a couple of years of leading technology back into The Coca-Cola Company.

So what changed?

Me. After graduating from Oxford University in 2023 with a Master’s in AI for Business, the world looked very different. Something unlocked in me. Like many others, I believe that AI is mission-critical to businesses and people. But it was more than using AI, which is just technology. I’m curious about the operationalization of AI across the organization and equally its widespread adoption. What are the better business outcomes that an intelligent enterprise can deliver at scale, with speed, and sustainably? There’s so much going on. Understanding workloads, standardization of approaches, automating where appropriate, leveraging AI, and tying everything back to results has my full attention.

Omnicom

So, I joined Omnicom in 2023. They have a clear mission, with key partners like Microsoft, and have invested in an AI-driven future. Now I’m part of a technology team helping to accelerate Omnicom towards that future reality.

What’s next?

Focus and execute. Listen and learn. Collaborate and communicate. And above all else, keep moving forward into 2024.

Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Automation (AiA) are connected by intelligence.  And it’s no coincidence.  

(Intelligent) Automation

The corporate ask of automation remains the same; do more with less.  Because time is money. Automation is an efficiency play to do things right. Map out the processes that people follow to get things done. Then, start automating the simple tasks to free up increasing amounts of time to do things better suited for humans.  

What we really want is for people to adopt more automation, adapt their current ways of working, to ultimately readily embrace machines as part of their everyday.  Let’s be clear, augmented humans are (going to be) more productive than non-augmented ones.  The future of work is less about (wo)man being replaced by machines, but more about augmented humans displacing non-augmented ones.  This is why workers that ignore what’s happening today do so that their risk, and will more likely end up on the wrong side of the change equation.  

Automation doesn’t create much.  It optimizes a lot.  Intelligent automation uses AI to learn how to automate repetitive and routine tasks.  

Artificial (Intelligence)

AI is the technology that enables machines to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence.  AI is an effectiveness play to do the right things. Machines run algorithms that analyze data, find patterns in it, and make predictions off it.  Today, AI makes routine predictions that need humans to make those last-mile decisions.  You must’ve terms like keeping the human in the loop. Humans still provide the necessary guardrails on decision-making and learning goals to continuously progress machines gain more and more human intelligence.  

However, machines are learning faster than humans in specific contexts.  Once trained, AI required less data, in new contexts, to make accurate predictions.  AI is accelerating toward machine intelligence.

Smarter Children

So, what if as a parent you knew that your child was going to be so much smarter than you ever could be? Not only that but your child’s intelligence could potentially periodically double ad infinitum.   What would you do?  And how would you do it? 

As a civilization, we have struggled to manage the human race with many amazing leaps and near-disastrous events along the way.  We are adding machines into the mix and are re-writing new rules of engagement.  I hope we do better than the Titans and Olympians, where Zeus and his siblings overthrew their parents. Humans are not Titans, and machines are not Olympians. However, we are going to have to work hard to co-exist and deftly sidestep the fall of the Titans (read as humanity)!

The promise of automation is to lighten your current load.  To give you more time to focus on the things that matter most.  However, you have to give up precious time now to get more time later.  For already time poor, busy people, that’s just too much for them to automate today. 

The tomorrow never comes syndrome is everywhere.  For companies, we see them tripping over short term revenue wants when struggling to meet long term value needs.  Or at home, sacrificing retirement investments to literally survive today.  

But you have to make a call. And it’s your call.  Do you want to be in the same place next year, or somewhere else?  If the latter, then invest the time.  Automation is supposed to make things better in the long run.  However, we don’t know how much better.  So we hesitate, and many never take that essential first step towards progress.  It’s time to get out of your own way.

Automate today example

I’ve been a long time user of Things.  It’s a task-based tool that runs across all my Apple devices.  I never forget stuff because Things remembers and reminds me.  It’s by task brain. This weekend I got notification that Things had integrated with Apple Shortcuts to better automate tasks.  I was excited at first, and then sighed. But instead of parking the task and kicking that learning downstream, I took the time to educate myself today. 

After a couple of hours of reading and testing, I had converted my micro tasks into macro actions. This equates to a 30 minute saving every day.  That was definitely worth the two hours upfront investment time. I gambled and won.

The automation returns for organisations are literally off the scale.  But you have to give to get. Don’t believe that tomorrow never comes.  It always does.  And when it does, be better than the day before.  Otherwise, what are you doing?