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Big Business Insights: AI and the human touch

• Old Mutual • Season 1 • Episode 3

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The growing presence of AI is multifaceted and impacts our lives in multiple ways. However, AI is not new and learning to grapple with this topic is important both now and for the future.  

This episode of the Big Business Insights podcast unpacks the profound impact of artificial intelligence on various industries. Host Blessing Utete, Managing Executive at Old Mutual Corporate Consultants, is joined by Antonia Bothner, Capital Markets Lead at Endeavor SA, and Samad Masood, Associate Vice President at the Infosys Knowledge Institute, to dive into AI’s role and the challenges it faces in understanding human emotions and adaptability within the workspace. 

The trio highlights the value of maintaining the human touch even while advancing technologies and successfully using AI as a co-creator instead of using it to replace human beings.  

Resources used in this episode: 

Old Mutual Corporate Big Business Insights Podcast Ep.3 AI and the human touch – collaborating for a smarter future 

Blessing Utete: Today we're tackling a topic that's been quietly at work behind the scenes for decades. But is now making headlines across industries today. Artificial intelligence or AI. From the moment you wake up and check your phone, to managing your finances, or even correcting a typo in your emails, AI has been subtly transforming our daily lives in ways we often don't realise. 

Take banking for example, AI has been assisting in fraud detection for years. Analysing thousands of data points faster than the human could. It's there when your bank sends you an alert about a suspicious charge, or when a loan approval happens in seconds instead of weeks. And it's not just banking every time we use tools like spellcheck or predictive text, AI is in the background. Helping us communicate faster and more efficiently.

Global Education YouTube Clip: Have you ever wondered how your phone can recognize your face to unlock itself? Or how your favourite music app suggests new songs you might like? Well, these are all thanks to artificial intelligence is an enhanced technology that enables computers and machines to think and learn like humans. It's like having a brain inside a computer. 

One of the most common ways we interact with AI is through virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. These helpful companions can answer questions, set reminders, play music, and even control our smart home devices. 

Blessing Utete: But here's the question that sparked today's discussion. As AI becomes more advanced and ingrained in our lives, what happens to the human element? 

While it can streamline processes, organise vast amounts of data, and save us precious time, can AI truly innovate or connect with us on an emotional level? Can it replace the creativity, empathy, and intuition that makes us, well, really human? Welcome to the Big Business Insights Podcast brought to you by Old Mutual. 

I'm your host, Blessing Utete, the Managing Executive at Old Mutual Corporate Consultants. By meeting thought leaders and visionaries across sectors, looking at the past, the present and the future, we aim to give business leaders the 360 degree advantage. I'm joined by two brilliant guests, Antonia Bothner, Capital Markets Lead at Endeavor SA. How are you, Antonia? 

Antonia Bothner: I'm good, thanks, Blessing. 

Blessing Utete: And we're also joined by Samad Masood, Associate Vice President at Infosys Knowledge Institute UK. Welcome, Samad. 

Samad Masood: Hi, thanks, Blessing. Thank you very much. 

Blessing Utete: It's really great to have both of you here and really together we're going to dig into AI's role in today's world. 

And how we can harness this powerful technology without losing the magic of human connection. So let's get into it and I think maybe just as a start, you know, we know that AI has really transformed several industries. Samad, in your experience, how much of this transformation has improved efficiencies and how much has actually enhanced human creativity and connection? 

Samad Masood: On one level, that's quite a difficult question to answer in terms of how much human creativity. It's enhanced and such. Measuring that is very, very difficult but in terms of business value, we have actually done quite a bit of work at looking at where AI has been applied by businesses and what sort of value they're getting back from it.

Almost exactly a year ago, the sort of second half, last quarter, in fact, of 2023, my organisation had a series of surveys of large companies looking at how they use generative AI in particular, that would have been about a year or two after chat GPT launched, we found that while many many businesses were deploying and interested in exploring and experimenting typically was only about 10 percent of deployments were actually generating a return on business value release in genitive items. 

Since then things have advanced a lot and I think it really depends on what area you focus, for instance in marketing there's a lot of a that has been used for a while. Because there's a lot of transactional data that can be analysed, a lot of personalization data can be analysed, and the uptake and value that comes from that is much higher, whereas, in certain industries or certain functions, it will be lower. 

But I think it's worth understanding that with any technology, the hit rate is sometimes not always as high as people assume because even if the technology itself works what's really really important? Is the how it's embedded in the organisation how it's embedded in the staff employees users the humans and that's why that interface is so important and it's not just to do with AI. 

For many decades, there's been evidence that often technology implementations in large businesses don't return the value that was expected because the processes don't change around them. Well, the people aren't helped to change their roles, their use of it. And the easiest way to think of it is you get a new technology implemented. 

That's supposed to improve things by 30 percent or whatever, but you basically use it as if your job doesn't change. You just do the same thing, so it takes the same amount of time. You just have a nice, shiny, expensive box to help you with it, but effectively nothing's really changing. So I think that's the way to look at a bit of a roundabout answer, but it's not as straightforward as some people think.

Blessing Utete: Yeah, I know, very, very interesting. Antonia, and what has been your experience in this field?

Antonia Bothner: Yeah, I think it's an echo of that kind of, I actually listened to a great podcast, a tech podcast, which talked about AI being in this quite awkward stage of being a tween in that they had all this potential, but actually a slight overconfidence in actually what it was actually producing and of course, recently, there have been massive leaps in terms of AI, particularly with the large language models. 

I think massive improvement in areas of efficiency. I know myself, we use it just to generate a kind of a newsletter, so I think certainly efficiency, there are many examples where you could point to that it's, transformed and improved efficiency. I think it's weird to see these other areas and particularly the more human areas in terms of all kinds of enhanced human creativity and connection.

And of course, any tech is a tool and it's limited by the human that is using the tech. So, I think we're at the early stages to see how we can quantify that. Masses of money have gone into this sector, particularly by the big names, you know, Microsoft. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and it's impacting huge industries like the micro post, you know, the chips and video. 

So the question is, is kind of in its infancy and, you know, I think these questions are probably asked from many technologies that came about, you know, finance, in essence, is a massive technology that was kind of an invention in civilization. And actually not that far back in fact, we were probably using numbers. 

First and then developed language, even books. So I think with, with all of these things, you know, my experience, it's, we're in an early stage of looking at the transformation, but it's huge, the application and the potential. 

Blessing Utete: Both of you are talking about the adaptability and maybe touching on the cultural practices of adoption because, you know, yes, you can have, as Samad said, that shiny box and doesn't make use of it.

I mean, we, we've just deployed copilot as a pilot and it's variations of usage. Some people just carry on as they've been doing and other people are starting to use it. And so, you know, really AI has the ability to organise vast amounts of information and streamline processes. However, does it really have the capability to innovate? 

Is innovation still a uniquely human trait? And what are your thoughts on that one, Antonia? 

Antonia Bothner: I work with entrepreneurs and so even though they're in the tech space, and I still believe that innovation is a hugely human quality. It's, you know, the root of often comes about during some kind of a hardship or suffering. 

In fact, you know, necessity is the mother of all inventions.So I think it's the innovation part, depends what you qualify that, but this human potential to imagine, which is essentially what it ends up being. Boiling down to is this part of being human that you can't imagine because it's not there, I'm not sure that AI can do that. 

It might sort of rehash, but what is essentially original? Where does that come from? And that is what creativity is. Even the word artificial actually, I looked at the etymology. It actually comes from the word art and being created by humans. So at some point, there is an element of that human consciousness, that human imagination, that is what allows for that originality. 

I'm not too sure that you can qualify AI as being innovative in a human sense, but it might actually end up boiling down to semantics. 

Blessing Utete: Samad, maybe over to you, what are some of the biggest challenges you've seen in integrating AI into human centric businesses, particularly when it comes to maintaining empathy and meaningful customer interactions?  

And I know for, for us as Old Mutual, this is significant because we are in that space where we advise people on the financial outcomes and a lot of that has to do with the psychology and the emotions that go with money. So thinking around those thoughts, you know, what are some of the things you seeing in the integration there? 

Samad Masood: I'm going to answer this like I do with lots of things in that it really all depends and I think it depends on what we mean by human centricity because certainly all businesses require humans and are human centric in one way. But whether your business model depends on human centricity is another. If the customer is expecting a human response, you know, you're expecting to be served at a restaurant by a human, you know, you're expecting to speak to a human psychologist. 

Perhaps there are certain things where people expect and want to have human interaction. And that's part of the value. Because it's based on real relationships, and I think there in that case, you know, when we think about how AI interacts with humans, I think something that is often not talked enough about is there is a creepiness factor, right? 

There is a creepiness factor that people feel when they're dealing with AI. And I think we have to accept that and there's a trust issue and there's a concerns, you know, for many people working in organisations and in the consumer world that are worried about the future of AI.  And while people want to experiment with it, I think we have to be honest with ourselves.

A lot of us are quite scared about it and I think those elements have to be taken into account to understand how can you build trust. How can you use AI to enhance human capability and that you in fact can become perhaps more human centric through the use of AI and Blessing you described your own organisation.

Of course, it's human centric from your perspective, but I would suggest that from a customer's perspective, they're not expecting a human interaction that what they're expecting is a financial transaction, but perhaps I can help you also develop that human centric or that more human ability or to invest in more sort of human interactions so that the customers also see that as a human relationship they're having with their organisation. 

But I think the key elements are building trust, by augmenting humans, enabling the humans in your organisation and your customers, your partners, you know, to really have more human relationships. Cause that's really what people want and that's what human centricity means. But if you're using the technology to try and just kind of obfuscate or put another barrier between the humans and your customers, then it may work in some cases, but I think you may also struggle with, with some pushback from customers and employees. 

Blessing Utete: I think that element of the trust element is always going to be the part that really makes the building of relationships forge ahead. I like what you said about its augmentation. So using AI as a support, but you know, you don't actually lose the humanness of these connections. We're going to go into a clip now from a TED talk given by Beena Ammanath. 

It's about the value of human creativity in the AI era. Let's take a listen and then I'll get your thoughts on it.

TEDx Talks YouTube Clip: We are in a period of change. There is intense technological change happening around us. It's complex. It's confusing. It's fast and things are moving every day. Right? There are the rules and applications of AI are not well defined, but eventually, this change will evolve and settle down where we'll find that new paradigm, a new way of life where humans and AI and machines work together effectively. 

So I do think when that happens, human creativity will have way more value. 

Blessing Utete: Maybe let's start with Antonia. What's your first reaction to that comment by Barbina?

Antonia Bothner: You know, I absolutely agree with her and I think that's been shown over time, you know, initially when we have a new technology, it can feel quite destabilising. 

We immediately want to resist against it and it's like with anything, when there's something, a new paradigm. But after a while we do, we, you know, we don't even realise that we're actually, we're veering towards cyborgs, we're no longer a natural selection, you know, we live twice as long. These are big changes that are happening in our civilization, but it does break down to a norm after a while. 

And you know, there's a fascinating book by a guy called Ian McGill Christ called The Divided Brain. And it's looking at brain lateralization, looking at the creative versus the logical. And his whole theory about the divided brain is that we've become too reliant on the low cost, the scientific, the maths. 

Since the scientific revolution, we start to devalue the creative side, the side that is a lot more spontaneous and actually, I think you might even see with this let's call the master and his emissary. And the idea is not to devalue the one over the other, but actually to allow both. And so potentially with this new technology, there's a way for us to start to really value creativity and the irrational aspect rather than the purely rational aspect. 

The imagination, the mythopoetic versus the purely scientific way so I think it's quite fascinating, It's a wonderful opportunity for us to really think about what it means to be human and to actually pay attention to the psychology and the deeper layers of our consciousness, which I think is a lovely saying about, you know, art is a tool of knowing who we are and what we want. 

We need to be reflected, and often it's through this creativity that we get to know ourselves. So, yeah, I think this is the positive side of where we think AI is going. Of course, there are always risks and being aware of that, but I think it's very exciting.

Samad Masood: I'm going to take a bit of a sort of devil's advocate stance on this one, because what was mentioned, I mean, you could argue that that's something that has been said about every technological wave, and Antonia even referenced that, you know, it has happened before. 

Let's look at social media. That's a technology. No one planned, no one expected. It's a technology that's completely revolutionised the way we work as a society, created a new value chain of creative people who create memes, who create troll accounts, who create comedy videos, whatever, right? It's boosted creativity.

AI, we're looking ahead at something and talking about something that's going to happen and not realising the thing that's already happening with us right now. We are already in that era, we're an incredibly communicative and creative era of our lives and I think it's also worth having some perspective on AI, that since chat GPT launched, all of us now have experience of some form of AI. 

But I think what we tend to forget is that actually artificial intelligence has been being worked on and has been being deployed in businesses and governments and systems for many decades and has been slowly getting better and better and better and the janitor of AI revolution or appearance of it. 

What it's really doing is just giving lay people like ourselves the opportunity to test and see what can happen right. It's been a big shift from how I think it's worth understanding. It's almost a mark of previous degenerative AI you could see AI is predominantly being used. To understand the world to take content in and document it and analyse it and understand it. 

Where is regenerative AI? It's taking inputs and it's creating stuff. It's creating images. It's creating music. It's creating videos. It's a creative AI. And so I think we need to kind of redefine what we mean by being creative, right? And the creative parts of our brains. I think the fact is being creative and being flexible on thinking that is what being human is.

And from the clip we heard earlier, on one hand, I can't disagree with it, but I can also say it's not that surprising because that's what we do with every wave of technology. And I think, Antonio, you mentioned that, right? That there's everything that comes. We always develop some sort of new form of creativity.

I think the kind of weird thing is that this time around, the traditional types of things that we would consider creative, pictures, moving images, sound, songs, music, poems, are all being created by the AI. So we've now got to find, well, what are the other creative mediums? Which is why I started this answer talking a bit about social media memes and stuff like that. 

Maybe in 50 years time, they will be up in the museums and we'll be going and Looking at who is the, uh, Michelangelo of Instagram and this sort of thing,

Blessing Utete: Samad so, so I mean, with what you're saying there, do you then see, I mean, this AI is more of an assistant or, or a collaborator in the future? I mean, you know, if you think about your analogy now of, of what will we see in what we think are, you know, art museums built by AI or humans will be featuring in terms of that, the creativity of artwork. 

What do you think that's going to look like in the future? 

Samad Masood: Blessing, I'm going to tell you now, no one's ever considered my views on art as very important, so I probably won't spend too much time trying to determine what the future of art will look like. That's not necessarily my specialisation, but I think what's interesting, you mentioned this point about assistant and versus collaborator, right? 

And like, what is the difference between that? And I think that is something that's, we're entering an era and I think I mentioned earlier in my answer about AI is a, you know, it's something that's being developed and deployed for decades now, right? And really, it is just a form of mathematics and algorithms that are being deployed and used.

And we're just getting better and better, and they're getting more sophisticated. But actually, we could think of this really, it's just the natural extension of the computing revolution. And you could ask yourself, you know, at what point did computers change from just being assistants to being collaborators? 

And I think it was quite a while back since we've been using computing power as a collaborator to kind of co-create things with us, you know, and there's, since the 60s, there's been musicians who've been creating digital music and such. So I think that's, it's just an ongoing development that we'll see. 

Of course, it does raise the question, how do we define being human, you know, in the future? And how do we distinguish perhaps better rather than define between what is a human thing and what is not a human thing and whether it matters at all. But that is probably too big a question. 

Blessing Utete: Maybe to Antonia, just maybe this, we've touched on this a little bit in terms of the ability of AI To give advice based on data. 

And I mean, the question there is really, can it ever truly understand human emotions and complexities of relationships, which are sometimes very critical in business?

Antonia Bothner: I think the answer is yes. If you take it to a very basic level, understanding is quite a logos, but if you say truly understand, that changes. 

So I think it's important, actually, particularly in finance, we are actually too emotional when we make decisions, which is why having an advisor is great because you can really just cut through the data. And actually that's almost why it works so well. We take out that irrationality, but that's also the limitation because it is that irrationality that makes us. 

And that's a big question, a sense of being a sentient being. And sometimes that is important to understand those complexities of relationship, actually the ability to actually be Machiavellian, which is a weird trade, but it's, it's a part of being human about a strategy, you know, that is a motive that is what comes in and I'm not, you know, it's too, I think it would be too literal from an AI perspective, which in a sense as that transparency, but it's never going to be that second derivative. So I'm not sure. I mean, because some of those things are absolutely critical in business when you're talking about strategy. 

So I think that they're different layers in terms of understanding and certainly in a sales capacity where you really need your emotion, you need those tactics, the strategy, I'm not sure AI would be able to compete on that level, but, and the others, you know, certainly it's fantastic because you can cut through all the noise and the limitation of using the data in healthcare sector or the large data that can be analysed in terms of finding solutions to diseases and even in climate change. 

These are areas that are really quite exciting, but I think we need to differentiate in the different areas of business where it could be useful. 

Samad Masood: Antonio, if I could just build on what you said, because the emotion part of a decision is so important, right? And we've been for years in business saying we need to make data led decisions. 

But still, I think people struggle to make data-led decisions, right? They need to have a narrative to understand the data. I understand why the data comes like that because if you do, if you spend any time with data, you realise that the answer is very, very rarely obvious in data. You know, the more you look at data, the more grey areas there are, and the more of your discernment you need to use to decide what to do. 

And there's a point I made earlier about trust, you know, if AI is to do this for us, we need to trust, you know, why do we trust the colleague telling us, we should do this versus a computer telling us that we should do this. It depends on, you know, over time how the trust we build, but also the narrative they give us.

And I think that's where that human element has to come in. I do feel that we generally overestimate the ability for data to make a decision, right? And for AI to make a decision, because ultimately AI is just mathematical formulas, right? And you, as a human, have to design those formulas to decide at what point do they decide this is this, is it, is it, you know, a blue or red or is it forward or backwards or, you know, so probably we put a bit too much stead in that. And I do wonder how that will develop over time. 

Antonia Bothner: Mark Twain famously said there are three types of lies, lies, damn lies, and statistics and it's to your point, you know, it's the narrative and you know, you can look at data and you can build a story around it. It really depends on the lens that you're looking at. 

And that's why we find in the financial markets, you know, everyone can have all these predictions and economists are famously known for never actually having the right predictions because there is always this tail event. This black swan, this irrationality, this exuberance that we're just not able to see. 

And data doesn't actually get us there because the models just can't model it and I think Nassim Taleb actually does a lot of work around this with a lot of his work. And that's the element in terms of that unexplained. portion, as you say, if you cannot solely rely on a set of data, there has to be that element that of bringing, you know, that human element into it. You know, in the master and his emissary, you can't let the emissary overtake the master. It needs to be put in its place. You know, that it's actually just a tool, you know, it's not something that's going to be overtaking you. 

Blessing Utete: Yeah. And I think maybe just in terms of the, with the context you've set, I mean, I mean, AI is going to continue to evolve with the evolution of the quantum leaps that are being forged.

And so in that context, what kind of skills do you think future generations need to cultivate to stay relevant in a world that relies on tech for basic decision making? Maybe we can start with you Samad and then we can go to Antonia.

Samad Masood: Yeah, thanks. I mean, I think I used the term discernment earlier and it's a term I like to think I think sometimes people call it critical thinking. 

I think really, you know, the skills that are important, I suppose, people really need to develop are a kind of critical thinking approach to technological outputs that they're given. That's how we can help technology be better and that's how we can help complement. The technology because it isn't magic and it can't do everything and it won't get everything right And we need to be there to sort of guide it It doesn't mean we all have to be computer programmers or mathematicians, but it does mean that we need to be comfortable with and getting more familiar with these things and you know you were saying Blessing your organisation is using copilot. And some people use it some people don't, I think we need to give people the kind of confidence to make a mistake if you remember when computers first became popular and you know when you were first using a computer and my children don't have this feeling ever but older computers you felt that if you typed the wrong thing, it could break the whole computer Yeah, and you were worried that I need, can I do that? 

Can I press that button? Can I, and now you realise there's very little you can do to actually break the computer? Yeah, particularly as you just turn it off and on again and I think we're at that stage where they are, we've got to kind of realise that bad things probably can't happen in our own experimenting with AI and we need to be a bit braver with it as, as individuals. 

That's not the same advice I'd give to a corporate, right? Corporates have responsibilities, AI can go wrong, programs can go wrong, and they need to be very, very careful and responsible about it. But in terms of your question of what individuals need to do, I think we need to be a bit braver, and we shouldn't sort of think, oh, well, that's just for mathematicians or computer programmers to deal with.

Blessing Utete: Antonia, your, your thoughts, and maybe you can also just add, are there jobs that AI is just going to replace? What jobs might it create? 

Antonia Bothner: Well, of course, alluding to a book by Max Tegmark called Life 3. 0. And he shows the map in terms of the sort of destruction of jobs from the, the routine jobs that AI is going to replace. 

And thankfully, you know, a lot of us don't want to do this types of, of roles and sort of data crunching and then, you know, he has this landscape and it goes into a hill and you've got the creative industries in the top, you know, whether or not that's right is, is yet to be seen. But I think something that comes up with the entrepreneurs that we work with is this layer of software developers and coding. 

And actually most technologies would take off these bottom layers and this one is really hitting the sort of software. AI is so smart it can end up completely replacing a lot of the software engineers. So you know, what is it that you need to stay relevant? What do you, what do you tell your kids they should be learning? 

And I think it's, we'll still go back to the fundamentals of how you make decisions as a human. Yes, they're tools and they can reinforce, you know, you see people with garments and they sort of start telling them about their health, but that is not what's, you know, that's just a reinforcement. Actually, if you're really honest with yourself and how you're feeling in your body, you will actually know that already.

So I would say it's really developing those human tools of using the tech to enhance that rather than replacing it to allow those tools of imagination, which you might not be using, you know, to get stimulated with the tech. 

Blessing Utete: Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. I think it's really more about, you know, continuous learning, growth mindset, continue to be open to these new technologies.

I'm going to go to our cornerstone question. Both of you, you know, what do you think we haven't said about this topic today? We start with you, Samad. 

Samad Masood: What will be the next surprising thing that takes us forward? You know, I've been looking at technology trends for almost 25 years and every few years it runs in cycles and so for me, it's sort of what will be the next thing that surprises us. 

Blessing Utete: Thanks a lot, and Antonia? 

Antonia Bothner: You know, I think there are obviously a lot of concerns, you know, there's the dystopian and utopian version. So maybe this sort of existential risk ethical development because you can do it for good and you can do it for bad because, you know, you know, the internet is developed. 

You have a dark web you know, it's just the nature of, of what's behind it, the governance, you know, how international is this or does it become, you know, if you think about world wars, you know, even finance during the cold war, it's about finance. It's about moving money around. It wasn't necessarily about, so how is this going to be used in international warfare? 

You know, so they're all these derivations of, you can't actually quite comprehend, but it's you know, that also falls down to the fact being that, you know, humans have got to start and that side. So maybe, you know, yes, there's a societal impact in terms of solving climate and health, but there's also an incredibly dark side and how do we control that? 

Blessing Utete: Well, thank you very much, Antonia and Samad. This has really been a fascinating conversation on AI and the art of human connection and I'm sure this conversation will continue, but really thank you on behalf of our podcast for joining us. 

Antonia Bothner: Great to be here.

Samad Masood: Thanks a lot Blessing. 

Blessing Utete: And that wraps up our conversation on AI and the art of human connection. 

If there's one takeaway from today's episode, it's that while AI has a significant role to play in enhancing efficiency and organising information, it's the human touch, our creativity, empathy, and ability to think outside the box that keeps businesses thriving. AI may streamline, but it can't replace what makes us unique. 

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