One thing seems certain: people are not yet ready for “digital workers.”
That’s the lesson learned by Sarah Franklin, CEO of Latticea performance management and HR platform that offers performance coaching, talent assessments, onboarding automation, compensation management, and a host of other HR tools to over 5,000 organizations worldwide.
What is a digital employee? According to To FranklinThey are avatars like Devin the engineer, Harvey the lawyer, Einstein the service agent, and Piper the sales agent who have “entered the workforce and become our colleagues.” But these aren’t real workers. They’re AI-powered bots. They’ve been introduced by companies like customer relationship management giant Salesforce and startups like Cognition.ai and Qualified perform work in place of humans.
from Salesforce EinsteinFor example, it can help sales and marketing professionals predict revenue, complete tasks, and communicate with prospects. Cognition’s software engineer, Devin, can plan and execute complex engineering tasks that require thousands of decisions, while remembering relevant context at each step as he learns over time and corrects his own mistakes. Qualified’s sales rep, Piper, “works around the clock to turn incoming website traffic into a workflow” and is “smart, hard-working, and far exceeds her workflow goals.” Neither of these agents, as far as I can tell, require health insurance, paid time off, or retirement plans.
Franklin saw an opportunity and decided to take advantage of it. On July 9, the The company said that it would begin supporting digital employees as part of its platform and treat them like any other employee.
“Today, Lattice is making AI history,” Franklin said. “We will be the first to provide digital workers with official employee records in Lattice. Digital workers will be securely onboarded, trained, and assigned goals, performance metrics, access to appropriate systems, and even a manager. Just like any human would.”
The backlash was swift and in many cases brutal, particularly on LinkedIn, which is not generally known for its wild interaction like X (formerly known as Twitter).
“This strategy and message largely misses the mark, and I say this as someone who is building an AI company,” said Sawyer Middeleer, an executive at a company that uses AI to help with sales research, in LinkedIn“Treating AI agents like employees is disrespectful to the humanity of real employees. Worse, it implies that humans are viewed simply as ‘resources’ to be optimized and measured against machines. It’s the exact opposite of a work environment designed to elevate the people who contribute to it.”
Scott Burgess, a self-employed marketing executive, was even more direct.
“Terrifying,” he said. aware“The more AI is used everywhere, the more I start to think that this shit is going to ruin everything. Workers are already struggling enough and now they have to compete with ‘AI workers’ (.) Can we just put it back in its box and send it back?”
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The reaction, which even earned the post the dubious honor of being included in the “LinkedIn Lunatics” subreddit, was enough to force Franklin to put his company’s plans on hold three days after his announcement.
Of course, these concerns are legitimate, but was Franklin wrong? Aren’t “digital employees” inevitable?
There is no doubt that AI is currently being given too much importance. We have seen the embarrassing failures of Google-generated AI results. We have experienced the less than stellar performance of Microsoft’s Copilot AI offering. We know that, with all the predictions, forecasts, and guesswork, AI is still in its early stages. Even the aforementioned AI-powered “digital assistants” are known to only be capable of performing the most rudimentary tasks so far, and at least from what I hear from my customers and read on Google, Some surveys – most executives rightly believe that AI, at its young age, is as unreliable as a small child.
Franklin made the same mistake as Microsoft, Google, and other big tech platforms: hyping up something that isn’t yet ready for the big time in order to gain a marketing advantage. You can’t blame her for her vision. It’s just that, like many others, she executed on that vision too early. It’s still early days for AI, and humans are still trying to absorb its implications. There will undoubtedly be “digital employees” and they will work better than most human employees in the not-too-distant future. We just don’t know when that future will be. Clearly, it’s not now.