Artificial intelligence can help human workforce optimize its performance

Harish Rijhwani is the author of the book ‘9 to 5 Cubicle Tales’. He has twenty years of corporate experience and ten years as a visiting faculty teaching in various management institutions. In an interview with Bizz Buzz, he says, “Young professionals face two main types of challenges, viz. personal and professional, which the book ‘9 to 5 Cubicle Tales’ focuses on covering. Specifically, from a corporate perspective, one meets various characters; some might support you, while others will oppose your thoughts and ideas. The book highlights that some problems can be solved quickly after some guidance from your seniors. However, in many cases, one needs to be innovative and think out of the box. Each day in the corporate world is a new challenge, but whatever the situation the book showcases, one needs to be calm. Overall, one needs to be persistent in achieving a goal and face challenges head-on, as that is when one is forced to think differently”

What are day-to-day challenges faced in the corporate world and how to overcome them?

One will mainly face three specific types of challenges in the corporate world which I term as PPT - people, process and technology. People challenges arise mainly due to miscommunication and in many cases due to lack of communication. The way to avoid it is to have an open-door policy and constantly speak with your team members. Process challenges are many, from quality to appraisal we need to follow a process. Awareness and constant communication is the key in case of the appraisal processes if that doesn’t happen you might end up with a disgruntled reportee. If you work in an IT company, the third aspect of technology shouldn't be much of an issue, though there are nooks and corners in the supporting functions, which can be challenging. But in many other industries acceptance of new technology can be a challenge. The only way to overcome it is by using structured and planned change management.

How does your book ‘9 to 5 Cubicle Tales’ address the challenges one faces in the corporate world?

Young professionals face two main types of challenges, viz. personal and professional, which the book focuses on covering. Specifically, from a corporate perspective, one meets various characters; some might support you, while others will oppose your thoughts and ideas. The book highlights that some problems can be solved quickly after some guidance from your seniors. However, in many cases, one needs to be innovative and think out of the box. Each day in the corporate world is a new challenge, but whatever the situation the book showcases, one needs to be calm. Overall, one needs to be persistent in achieving a goal and face challenges head-on, as that is when one is forced to think differently.

What was larger key objective of writing a fiction book after issuing three non-fictional books?

My first three books are educational, catering to a niche market, and I tried to share the information via short stories. After that, however, I wanted to cater to a larger audience, which pushed me to write a fictional series.

How has the corporate landscape changed in the last 20 years?

During my MBA, we were told to read a book titled ‘The Goal’ by Eliyahu Goldratt. In one sentence, the gist of the book is that the goal of any company is to make money, which hasn’t changed in the past twenty years. Therefore, an essential aspect for employees (especially juniors) is to know how they can contribute towards the company’s goal. The other point that has changed is gauging new joiners on practical experience rather than theoretical knowledge. Organizations have started to focus on this by leveraging hackathons and other means to hire employees. In addition, many organizations are working in a hybrid model, which provides employees flexibility, and that’s the need of the hour. Due to this, the style of grooming juniors has changed. Overall we need a strong focus in this area because these juniors are the future leaders in any organization.

What was your journey like while crafting a piece of corporate life in 51 chapters?

I started writing this book in September 2021, I wrote one chapter, but I quickly realized my writing lacked something. Hence I decided to do a couple of courses from the British Council Library around creative writing. That’s when I realized that the “something missing” was the fictional elements of dialogues, plot, setting, and above all, the writing norm of “Show, Don’t tell.” So armed with this newfound knowledge of writing, I set out to complete my debut novel. I wrote at least five hundred words every night from March 2022 and finished the first draft by mid-July 2022. In between, I had to think of an appropriate title for the book as I ideated nearly sixty different names, and none of them sounded fiction. Finally, after a lot of brainstorming, I finalized 9 to 5 Cubicle Tales. By the way, the fifty-one chapters cover only the first three years of corporate life, and there is a long way to go before Hridaan can even reach anywhere near his ultimate goal. So, keep an eye out for the following parts of the series.

What is your target audience when you write your books?

My readers have been people from various age groups having a technical or non-technical background. But if I had to box it, I would say anyone between the ages of 16 to 40 might enjoy reading my books.

What are the effects of AI on human workforce in the corporate world?

The first example which comes to my mind is from 1940s that of Alan Turing and his team (The Imitation Game) who helped break the unbreakable ENIGMA code. Fast forwards to the current time, where AI has found a way in our day-to-day life in various industries. Big retail giants like Amazon, Flipkart, have used AI to make appropriate recommendations to their customers. Similarly even Netflix uses AI to recommend movies to its viewers. AI in healthcare has a big scope, there are a variety of models which have been developed over the past many years. One such model is CheXNet which predicts probability of 14 possible conditions for a patient by just looking at a Chest X Ray. Overall, AI can help the human workforce optimize their style of working, but you need to be aware of how to use it and were to apply the same.

How ChatGPT has gained momentum by bridging the gap between everything language and composition?

Chatbots are not new, Alexa, Siri are good examples of them. ChatGPT definitely adds a new dimension in this area and it will be useful. I am a strong believer that business and technology go hand in hand, and in many cases business drives technology. If you don’t have a specific business need/problem ChatGPT for you will just be a toy. Like in case of students, who only use it to get verbose answers and not really to learn it’s a toy. Naom Chomsky even criticized ChatGPT calling it high-tech plagiarism. But if you have a problem statement, then like any other analytical model, one needs to train ChatGPT to provide the appropriate solution.

Why AI governance is crucial for developing more dependable, comprehensible AI?

If you have seen the sci-fi movie “I, Robot” you will know the capability of a rogue AI intelligent machine. Even though the movie was fictional, but one can build harmful AI machines, and in order to protect everyone from such a situation AI governance is needed. AI can also produce biased results based on the kind of data one feeds (be it race, age, gender, though it all depends on the business use case) and to avoid this, one needs transparency and one can also see AI ethics coming into picture.

How do you see IT in the AIOps era?

It’s a vast and growing area and quite unstructured if you don’t use any tool like service desk, etc. for day-to-day IT operations. A big area in this includes that of customer support/service desk tickets. Many organizations use conversational AI to resolve end customer (external) queries, but many still have to take a step in streamlining internal IT operations.