Companies turn to their own staff for ideas how to harness AI

Australian companies are increasingly asking their employers to submit ideas about how artificial intelligence can be used to enhance their roles, a conference has heard.

Telstra group executive of data and AI Dayle Stevens.

Australian companies are holding out hope that their staff will be able to teach them how AI can be used to improve their roles.

A Telstra data and AI executive on Friday said the company was simply too large to have a good understanding of how each person’s role worked on an individual level and how technologies could be used to improve the ways they work. Instead, it was among a growing number of companies which are opening expressions of interest and in some cases cash prizes to creative employees who bring to the table ideas on how to use and implement the rapidly growing technology.

Telstra group executive of data and AI Dayle Stevens told the AI Leadership Summit in Sydney that while the company had been using the technology for a couple of years, it hadn’t done so in an environment where AI was accessible to everyone.

“What has changed is that it’s much more available to be in the hands of everybody,” she said.

“If we’re looking at productivity across all employees at Telstra, in everything that we’re doing, then we have had to think about how do we get AI safely into the hands of everybody who aren’t experts in cyber security and data protection.”

While Telstra had considered how AI could be used to enhance its processes, measuring how it would affect the productivity of employees was difficult. “What I don’t know is how does everyone at Telstra do their work and what is useful for them from a productivity standpoint so I need their ideas,” Ms Stevens said.

Organisations like Telstra had a role to play in educating smaller businesses when it came to the adoption and implementation of newer technologies, she said.

“With small to medium businesses, I feel like there’s a role that we need to play as large organisations to work (with them).”

Gilbert + Tobin partner and chief executive Sam Nickless. Picture: Hollie Adams

Sam Nickless, a partner and chief executive of law firm Gilbert + Tobin, which had run cash competitions for staff to come up with ideas to integrate AI, shared a similar view.

“We don’t really know what everyone does every day. We’ve kind of got a general idea but how they’re going about every task, we really don’t know. And there’s no way we can really know that from the top,” he said.

Mr Nickless said the competition the firm ran earlier this year was a communications exercise. “We just thought we should get people, firstly, engaged. It was a communications exercise. We also wanted to find where they saw the ideas,” he said.

CBA’s chief information officer Gavin Munroe said the bank only moved forward with the use of AI if its customers could understand how the technology was being used. “It shouldn’t be a surprise when customers find out AI is behind it, if that is going to be a surprise, you shouldn’t probably be using it,” he said. “That’s sort of the guiding principle we use.”

Originally published as Companies turn to their own staff for ideas how to harness AI