The Bright Future of AI: In Conversation with Pascal Bornet

Pascal Bornet boasts over 25 years of consulting experience, assisting AI implementation in companies such as EY and McKinsey as well as authoring two books, Intelligent Automation and Irreplaceable. Drawing on his wealth of knowledge, Pascal sat down with SSON, at this year's Intelligent Automation week, to discuss what AI means for the future.

What was the inspiration behind your books?

So, the first book, Intelligent Automation, was really about sharing with the broader audience what I learned over 25+ years of consulting experience and implementing those technologies for corporations across industries. So, the book is mainly for managers, CEOs, and executives who want to understand how to transform their companies and how to do it well.

While the second book is more about the outcome of decades of research, at the intersection of AI and humans, [which you have seen is the most important equation to solve]. It is really about identifying what it is, plus how to build the best connection between both. The second book is also about how we can survive and thrive in a world that is constantly changing, boosted by AI and other technologies. It presents an approach methodology that is applicable to us as individuals, but also to our kids, but also our organizations.

The framework is composed of three key competencies of the future […]  The first one is it being AI-ready. So being capable of using AI and technologies to their fullest extent, grabbing the opportunities and augmenting ourselves, boosting the efficiency and the performance of our companies, but also understanding the negative aspects, the risks, and the threats and being able to manage all these, the ethical aspects and so on.

The second one is being human-ready. This is the last part of the talk that I had this morning which [was] about building in a world where AI, especially as a technology, is taking more and more of the capabilities that made us humans or we thought made us human. What is remaining for us? Is AI taking our humanity, our skills, our everything? What is remaining?

So, from my research, there are interestingly human abilities, that all of us have, that we can cultivate to a higher level to make us as complementary, as synergistic as possible with technology. The real creativity that is coming from us humans is not a mix-and-match of data. [Instead, we] can do critical thinking, which is the capability to criticize the information that is given to us, the outcome and the outputs that are given to us by technology. Question it but also build the rules of the game in the sense of what is good, and what is bad. Only humans should be able to build ethics.

The last one is anything around social skills, empathy, connection, and communication. No one else in the human can better interact with another human for now, for no, no, forever […] You might think, OK, just because I write a few things, ChatGPT understands what I mean, so it is good at empathy. No, it is simulating the empathy. It is not authentic.

And the third competency is change-ready, which is about building. I mean, in a world that is exponentially evolving, where the number of innovations in the coming years will be as many as what we have seen in the last century, we need to build a whole new level of adaptability and resilience.

As we discussed this morning as well, the lifetime of our skills also reducing drastically. We need to be able to relearn skills. As I told you, it is going to be much easier if you build, if you constantly work on your three human abilities, you will still need less and less, but still need to build some expertise on something. Experts are finished now. And to learn this expertise, you need to be able to learn, relearn, and learn faster, faster, and faster.

So that is part of the third competency of the future, change ready.

Over the years, what is the most valuable piece of advice you have ever received?

I mean, I have never seen a company being successful in implementing those technologies at scale without bringing in the people first.

What does that mean?

It means informing the people on what those technologies are, how they can use them, and how they can build value with them. It is about educating them. So, teach them how to use those technologies and empower them.

It means giving them the right tools they need and finally incentivizing them. Adapting the KPI [to indicate] indicator of the performance, to make sure that those people use the systems and use them well.

You mentioned this morning that if we can automate everything, we shouldn’t! What do you believe is the limit of AI and automation? Is there a limit?

Yeah, that is a good question. And so, in a world where that is coming, where every company will have access to the same AI, what will make the difference? It will be those companies that will be able to combine their business. I mean to combine technology-enabled activities with human-enabled activities. So, those who will be able to identify where a human brings more value than a machine and vice versa will be the winners.

A few months ago, my wife and I had too many bank accounts. We had to reduce them. I mean, we had an operation to do! And so going through all the banks we have, we said, OK, but they all give us the same thing: they are all accessible through mobile. You can all do all transactions through mobile, through computers, all this is available. That is not a differentiator across all the specs. They all do the same.

So how, how are we going to reduce all this, all this market?

So, we travelled a lot, you know, that is why we have so many. And we said that for us, the most important thing is being able to get someone who connects with us within the coming hours, to understand our point and solve our issue. That is, for us, the most important part, you see the human factor made us choose this bank over another one.

And that is a perfect example.

What's your take on this:  is AI going to take all of our jobs?

Yeah. I think yeah, it will definitely. Our jobs as they are today will be completely changed. But again, one thing that will not change is our capacity to evolve our skills over time, and that is the most important. By cultivating the three uniquely human abilities that we talked about- creativity, critical thinking, and social skills- […] you will adapt your skills automatically to fit more in this direction of being more human, of building skills that are more and more complementary to technology.

What do you think is going to change in the next two years with AI automation, specifically focusing on corporate America?

Yeah, I mean, as I showed this morning, we went from APA to intelligent automation and intelligent automation is bringing us more capabilities to be able to automate end-to-end processes with the four capabilities: The vision, language, thinking, learning, and execution enable us to automate any process in a company. Generative AI is bringing an improvement into some of those capabilities like learning, thinking, and learning with more creativity- with more human-like language.

And we are going to see in the coming years action, the execution will be also enhanced by large language models. We already see vision is getting there with the generative eye in pictures, but [videos and so on are coming soon.] So, these capabilities in the coming two years will be improved thanks to large models.

And for me, the step after that, which is enabled as well by large models, is what we call autonomous agents. Whilst today you need a human to orchestrate and design a process [… with autonomous agents] you will just give a goal to an agent. For example: “create a new niche of market/ find me new clients.” Find any goal, any business goal and this agent will understand by itself. Break down this goal into sub-goals, into actionable actions, and we will use the different automations that you already built before to achieve the goal. And whenever any of the steps are not working, it going to try it again in a different way. It is going to memorize all the failures it had so that it does not do it again.

I mean, instead of us again orchestrating all those tasks, we will just give a goal and the goal will be achieved. Yeah, amazing, the bright future ahead of us.

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