When Will AI Become Like Email?
Stanford design instructor (and friend of mine) Jeremy Utley wrote in a recent blog post:
“I was on a panel last week before a gathering of private equity investors. A fellow panelist said something well-meaning: ‘You can't become an AI expert in an afternoon…’
“You could see it happen in real time. A kind of permission to disengage rippled through the crowd. I’m a hospitality expert. I’m a transportation expert. I’m an oil and gas expert. I don’t need to become an AI expert.”
Jeremy then asked the audience to reflect on how they viewed their expertise. “How many of you would say you’re an email expert? A spreadsheet expert? Nervous laughter. ‘You are,’ I told them. ‘You just don’t think about it that way — because it’s a skill you built so gradually you never noticed you were building it.’”
Jeremy’s point about unnoticed expertise reminded me of a job description I read about twenty years ago that listed proficiency with the Microsoft Office suite as a required qualification. Thinking everyone knew these tools, I asked someone from HR why it was necessary to include that. They told me that some employees still weren’t using the tools, and every time a manager tried to push back, the response from the employee or HR was, “It’s not in the job description.”
Fast forward to today, I just did a quick search for nonprofit finance jobs on Idealist, and almost none of the job descriptions list those “basic” software tools, much less e-mail or internet, as required skills. They are taken for granted.
Two weekends ago, I taught my course on change management for nonprofit leaders, and we started with a hypothetical scenario in which a CEO leads AI adoption in her organization. For many students, their instinct was to be patient with employees and give them time to adjust to the new technology. However, I suspect those same people, if they interviewed someone who refused to use email, would say, “absolutely not” to hiring them.
It got me thinking: At what point will AI tools stop being “new” and become like email—i.e., something everyone is required to use?
However, it’s not that a technology stops being “new.” Rather, it’s that leaders stop treating it as new, and thus start requiring its use, including it in job descriptions, and incorporating it into performance management. Knowing that AI skills will eventually end up in the same place as email and the internet is helpful for those trying to lead adoption, as it can focus the request. Rather than “Learn at your own pace,” the message can be much closer to, “Integrate it into your work as you feel comfortable, but know it’ll be a baseline expectation in 12 months.”
Finally, it was interesting to see that many of the finance job descriptions on Idealist mention specific tools like Excel or QuickBooks, but I saw none that mention AI as a required skill. I suspect that it won’t take twenty years for that change to occur!
For those of us further into our careers, that’s a useful thing to sit with. The employees of yesterday who refused to use email or learn Microsoft Office weren’t forced to leave at once, but, at some point, every new hire arrived already using those tools. The question isn’t just “When will AI become like email?” It’s “What does it mean if it already has for the next generation of workers?”