Machine-Learning Tips for Companies that Don't Want to Upset or Annoy Their Employees: Eye on A.I.

Although many companies talk about artificial intelligence, it's likely that the majority of their employees aren't actually using machine-learning technologies in the workplace. One big reason for that is while executives may be excited about A.I., employees may feel threatened or even insulted that managers would force them to use tools that that they fear will one day replace them. As FedEx senior data scientist Clayton Clouse said during an A.I. conference in San Francisco last week, "We shouldn't expect that people will jump up and down and be excited when we say, 'Hey, we're going to be augmenting your job with A.I.'" Citing a survey about A.I. from McKinsey, Clouse said that while the majority of companies polled by the consulting firm said they were implementing A.I. either in their business or through pilot projects, "only 6% reported that their employees were actually using the system the way they should be used." The employees, it turns out, are skeptical about A.I., especially machine-learning tools intended to automate decision-making in some way, Clouse said. If workers don't trust the A.I. tools to do as good of a job as them, they simply aren't going to use them, he explained.