Developing artificial intelligence principles for the workplace

Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to automatic systems that use data to make decisions, predictions, or recommendations. AI provides great opportunities to improve many aspects of our lives—how we work, learn, and live. Nevertheless, there are both pros and cons to using AI in the workplace. Advantages include increased efficiency and productivity, innovation, and removing remedial and/or tedious tasks from employees’ job descriptions. But as AI becomes more advanced and capable of taking on tasks previously performed by humans, job displacement has become a real concern. Employees will need to adapt to new roles and may be resistant to doing so, and new ethical concerns will undoubtedly arise.

Pop culture come to life

Since at least the 1980’s, popular movies have made us consider what would happen if AI became a reality. The Terminator made us consider what could happen if robots start thinking for themselves (and possibly decide humans are no longer needed). Then The Matrix showed a robotic AI enslaving humanity, and Ex Machina made us question how human emotions can be reconciled with non-human entities.

Although AI has been used in back-office applications for some time, it has much more relevance now that consumer-focused platforms such as ChatGPT, OpenAI, Google’s Gemini, and Microsoft’s Copilot have made the technology much more mainstream.

Executive Order on AI