Yesterday, I attended a meeting with my staff to discuss improving the efficiency of e-commerce operations at one of Japan's leading companies.
I have been involved in the operation since April, and the topic of the meeting was whether we can reduce labor costs and streamline the process using AI and DX.
The staff on-site are actively working to improve efficiency, or in other words, to make things easier for themselves, and projects to achieve this are already underway.
But what lies ahead?
Officially, companies are working on digital transformation and AI with the aim of making things easier in the future, with the rationale being, "Let's do what we can to make things more efficient and spend our time on more intellectual things!" But can employees really embrace that future?
In the United States, the home of AI, major companies are undergoing mass layoffs due to the impact of AI.
To put it bluntly, employees were working hard to improve work efficiency and utilize AI in order to eliminate their own place in the company.
It may be an exaggeration to say that people were being forced to dig their own graves without realizing it, but that is what is actually happening.
When we say "working on more productive and intelligent tasks," that is of course also within the scope of AI's capabilities.
There are fewer and fewer white-collar jobs where humans can beat AI.
Anthropologist Yuval Noah Harari writes in his book 21 Lessons:
"When horse-drawn carriages were replaced by automobiles in the 19th century, horses were abandoned, but cart drivers could switch to driving taxis.
But humans in the AI revolution are likely to meet the same fate as horses, as there is little they can switch to.”
This book was published in 2019, before generative AI was even a thing, but it covers a lot of what's happening now.
It's much more accurate than the "Nostradamus's Prophecies" that were popular when I was a child.
https://amzn.to/4kWsyrt
So what should we do now?
I think the key is to use AI and become a user and creator of it.
If you haven't used it yet, why not give it a try?
Will AI take away your time? Or your chair?
